Episode #055 - Transcript

Hello, everyone! I’m Stephen West. This is Philosophize This! And boy, oh boy, am I excited today because I’m in the presence of a man that I’ve looked up to for quite some time now, since I was but a child, a man who carries a list of accomplishments so vast, so extensive that to even try to mention them right now would be a lost cause because I’d run out of the valuable time that he’s bestowed upon me. Professor of philosophy at City University of New York, New York Times contributor, the CEO and founder of the How to Be a Stoic blog, celebrity philosopher, astronaut, Nobel Laureate…

Stephen West: Massimo Pigliucci, how are you today?

Massimo Pigliucci: Very good. I am definitely not a former astronaut, but I am probably not many of the things you mentioned also. But still, it’s a pleasure to be here.

Stephen West: Look, man, you got to pad the resume a little bit. We’re living in the era of Monster.com. Everybody’s doing it. Anyway, out of respect to your time, I want to delve right into the questions.

So, the last few episodes of the show we’ve been talking about David Hume. And I think so much of understanding what these thinkers were trying to get at back in their time is removing our own modern cultural biases from the equation. So much of making someone like a David Hume relatable to people in modern times is understanding the historical, cultural, and political context that he's operating from. I’d like to put ourselves into the shoes of David Hume. I’d like to put you into the 17th-century, leather, buckled shoes that David Hume no doubt would have been in. Put yourself in David Hume’s buckled shoes for a second. And can you speak briefly on, A, what is this political, cultural, historical climate that he’s existing in? And B, as David Hume is writing his anthology of work over the course of his lifetime, what questions are facing his generation? And what questions did David Hume think that he was answering?

Massimo Pigliucci: Well, those are excellent questions. First of all, I do think you’re right. It’s important to understand the cultural and historical context because, otherwise, one falls into a sort of typical fallacy of historical research which is often referred to as presentism, that is projecting our present understanding of things on people that wrote hundreds or maybe even thousands of years ago and coming up short because, of course, that’s entirely unfair, right? Those people did not have the body of knowledge, scientific, philosophical, or otherwise that we do have, that we’re living in a different place, that we’re living in a different culture. So, that’s—it is important to do what you’re suggesting.

That said, I mean, in my mind at least, unless you were specifically interested in the history of ideas and the history of philosophy in particular, my own interest in people like David Hume is because they actually, I still think, have something relevant to say to the present day, to people living today. So, maybe we’ll get there later. But to go specifically into answering your question, so, Hume was in the middle of the Enlightenment. Now, we don’t typically think of the Enlightenment as largely a French and/or continental phenomenon, but in fact, it spread throughout Europe. And Hume was part of the so-called Scottish Enlightenment. In fact, he was arguably the most prominent exponent of it. He did visit France. He was in Paris for a while. And he was, in fact, a guest—a very highly regarded guest at some of the major salons in Paris. So, he actually had opportunity to talk directly and interact directly with the philosophes in France.

He was also coming there for after—you know, at the very end sort of a long tail of religiously motivated, enforced suppression of free thinking and sort of independent ideas. People were still risking of being burned at the stakes as witches in Scotland at the time that Hume was writing, which is why some of his stuff actually got published only posthumously. His Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, for instance, which essentially present still today one of the best arguments against intelligent design, he was not comfortable publishing those during his lifetime. And his friends advised him not to do so. So, they were actually done—came out actually after his death in 1776. So, that’s the kind of—now, in part, that’s kind of the cultural background.

Now, what was he thinking that he was doing? Well, he was embarking in nothing short of the rebuilding of philosophy the way he thought about it. He was influenced of course largely by the new natural history, what we today refer to as science—so, Galileo, Newton, all those people—the successes of natural history. And he was sort of comparing that to what he saw as the very unsuccessful and sort of sterile set of tradition, philosophical traditions that we today call scholasticism. So, he was rejecting essentially medieval philosophy, and he was embracing, he was looking for some kind of new way of doing philosophy. And the new way of doing philosophy that he came up with was essentially to embrace the empirical sciences. A lot of what Hume was saying was that if you’re—in modern terms, something along the lines of, if you want to do epistemology, you also have to do psychology. And if you want to do what we today would call philosophy of mind, you better pay attention to what later became the sciences, and so on and so forth. If you want to study causality, you better know something about physics. If you want to study morality, you better know something about anthropology and what we today would call comparative anthropology, and so on and so forth.

So, this was very much an empirical—of course, Hume is considered one of the empiricists in philosophy together with Locke and Berkeley. It was a very much empirical-oriented philosophy, very much in constant dialogue with science itself. And this is something, of course, that in turn highly disturbed philosophers of a more rationalistic bend and most famously Kant. A lot of what Kant wrote, especially initially, was in fact a reaction to Hume.

Stephen West: Yes.

Massimo Pigliucci: He famously said, you know, that Hume woke him up from his slumber. So, even though Kant rejected a lot of what Hume was saying, he credited Hume with essentially making him feel out—think out of the box and sort of posing some really tough questions that philosophy had to answer.

Stephen West: Well, in the same way that Hume “awoke Kant from his dogmatic slumber,” I feel like this awakening process is not just something that happened in the area of epistemology or metaphysics and then that was it. It’s analogous to what was going on in the rest of the world during this time too. I mean, the level of change that was going on in the average person’s life during this time period is just absolutely enormous. It really was like an entirely new species was emerging.

But I’m curious to know what you think about this. When David Hume’s applying this skeptical eye that we’re talking about to the assumptions that people were making in philosophy before him, do you think any part of him is trying to prevent genius from being squandered, like in the way that Newton spent much of his life studying alchemy and the Bible and trying to find the fountain of youth, in the same way that Descartes built this entire elaborate, rationalistic system on top of a foundation that we have an incorporeal soul? Do you think there’s any part of Hume that’s trying to prevent this from happening again?

Massimo Pigliucci: Oh, that’s an interesting question. I don’t know that there’s any textual evidence for that. Well, in part there is. Hume was very critical of Descartes and essentially along the lines that we’ve been discussing. So, that interpretation as far as Descartes is concerned is very tenable. Newton is a different issue because actually both the kind of philosophy that Hume studied and, in fact, even, interestingly, Kant himself even though he was a very different kind of philosopher—they were both very impressed by natural philosophy, by science in particular, by the accomplishments of people like Galileo and Newton. So, actually, Newton and his ilk were a role model.

Now, you’re right, however, they were referring, of course, to the scientific aspect of Newton’s work, not to the biblical interpretations or to exegesis or to alchemy, which Newton spent an inordinate amount of time doing. In fact, he spent more time doing, I understand, biblical exegesis than doing physics.

Now, would have Hume thought that this was a waste of time? Very likely. Yes, I would think so. I don’t think that there is any direct textual evidence for that, but it’s hard to imagine that he wouldn’t.

Stephen West: Alright. Fair enough. So, as an intellectual pillar in the philosophical world, you’ve had many opportunities made available to you that a lot of other people could never say that they had. You’ve served on panels with, you have discussions with, you’ve debated several key players in the New Atheist movement in modern times including but not limited to the four horsemen of the atheist apocalypse. Now, pull up practically any debate by these gentlemen on YouTube, and you’ll find that if they’re the four horsemen of the atheist apocalypse, David Hume is the horse that they rode into town on. Whether they’re loosely referencing his thought, whether they’re explicitly quoting the guy, David Hume is a part of these discussions that are going on.

My question to you is this: what would he think of the New Atheist movement? Would he be a fan of these people? Would he be sympathetic to their cause? Would he be one of the horsemen himself, or would his skepticism be too strong and not allow him to be?

Massimo Pigliucci: Yeah, I don’t think Hume would appreciate the New Atheism the way it is often characterized. Hume was, if you read his biography, Hume was a very congenial kind of guy. He was always trying to be very nice to people and sort of very—you know, he was firm in his intellectual positions. He was not shy to sort of engage in debates throughout Europe or other people about his positions. But he was also very famously very friendly and very open to discussion. In fact, there is an episode, if I remember correctly, in Paris where he was asked whether he was an atheist, and he demurred. He said, no, I’m not. I don’t think a reasonable person should label himself that way. So, there is both in terms of character and sort of attitude and also in terms of philosophical skepticism—I don’t think that Hume would be particularly comfortable with the New Atheist movement.

What he would be comfortable with is some kind of positive—what I would call positive skepticism. You know that the skeptic movement—one of the most famous phrases in the skeptic movement is the one that originated with Karl Sagan that is that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, right? And actually, it technically didn’t even originate with Sagan. Sagan made it famous. The original of the phrase was one of the other founders of some of the Skeptical Inquirer magazine. But, regardless of that, we have all heard that phrase: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Now, that essentially is David Hume. Hume didn’t put it that way. He put it more interestingly, I think, and actually more broadly as the idea that an educated person ought to proportion his beliefs to the evidence.

Stephen West: Yes.

Massimo Pigliucci: So, not just the extraordinary claims, every claim has to be proportioned to the evidence, right? Of course, if the claim is extraordinary, you really do need extraordinary evidence. But if the claim is ordinary, you still need evidence in order to believe it. So, in that sense, I think David Hume is the father not as much of the atheist movement but of the skeptic movement. That said, of course, the boundaries between atheism and skepticism and all these other—and free-thinking and humanism today is very porous. I mean, a lot of the same people hang around in those circles. Although, they don’t completely overlap. There are some skeptics who are definitely not atheists, and I know some atheists who are definitely—who definitely could use a dose of skepticism about some of their beliefs outside of the supernatural.

But I think that Hume would be—would put himself outside of the fray in terms of, you know, looking at it from a distance. And he would be happy to engage with people in discussions and would definitely not be shy about defending his positions. But he would not actually be considering himself a New Atheist. I mean, you put him in that category, but quite frankly, I model myself after Hume. I don’t like to think of myself as a New Atheist. I certainly am an atheist. But I think I try to model myself toward the more reasonable and more congenial model of David Hume than, let’s say, of Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins.

Stephen West: Still, you read stories about David Hume going to church every Sunday of his life. What’s your read on that? Do you think that it was a token of submission with the witch burnings in the back of his head somewhere?

Massimo Pigliucci: Perhaps, or perhaps it was simply just—I mean, we don’t know unfortunately a lot about this because his own autobiography is very, very short. He wrote it at the end of his life when he was—he knew he was about, you know, he was going to die soon. And so, he put down a few notes, basically, about himself. So, it’s hard to say. I think that an equally reasonable interpretation is simply that he was a member of a community, and that’s the kind of behavior that was expected by the community. And he wasn’t one to ruffle feathers unnecessarily. He knew that his philosophy was already ruffling a lot of feathers anyway. He had been denied twice an academic appointment precisely on the ground that he was considered an atheist. So, I think that he didn’t look for a fight unnecessarily. So, if it’s—you know, if everybody in the community goes to church, sure, I’ll go to church. But everybody knows what I believe or don’t believe. And, so, they’re not going to be fooled for a minute.

In fact, there’s this interesting story: when he was sick at the end of his life, he was still receiving friends and even foes in his house. And there were these local clergy who would go on a regular basis hoping to see a death-bed conversion of the great atheist or the great agnostic as he was sometimes referred to. And they never got it. And in fact, they got kind of pissed off by the fact that Hume kept inviting them in, welcoming them into his house, and being congenial about the whole thing. But he was firm in his beliefs, or I should say disbelief in this case, all the way through the end. He never wavered on that.

Stephen West: But just think of how much more he could have gotten done if he had that three hours every Sunday morning—

Massimo Pigliucci: [laughs]

Stephen West: —if he just spent that doing philosophy. I mean, think of how much more he could have accomplished.

Anyway, that actually moves nicely into the next question I have, because we have the luxury of looking 300 years into the past. We know what subsequent human thought has been 300 years after David Hume. Now, I’m wondering, you personally, let’s say you could go back in a time machine. Let’s say that you could look at David Hume directly in his eyes as he’s sitting on his armchair doing philosophy. What is the one piece of advice that you would give him, the one maybe assumption that he’s making that would have taken him to the next level?

Massimo Pigliucci: Oh, boy. That’s an excellent question. I don’t know that I have a ready answer for it. But I think that what I would do is actually advise him to publish his un—the work that eventually did get out only after his death—to publish them now, not to wait. Because I think that there is a good chance, first of all, that they would have had an even larger impact than they already did, but more importantly is that he would have been freed from those works. He kept revising this stuff like we all do before publication up until the end. And he would have been freed of those particular works and perhaps incentivized to keep writing new things.

Now, we need to note that Hume did actually not write any new philosophy for a large chunk of his last part of his life. He devoted himself to other things. In fact, mostly he became famous as an historian. He wrote this stupendous history of England. So, one piece of advice maybe that I would give him would be to just waste less time with—not with the history because the history was very good—but waste less time with things like diplomatic efforts and chatting with the people, and actually get down to—resume his philosophy. He, at some point in his life, he was convinced that he didn’t have anything else to—anything new to say in philosophy. And I think that probably was giving up a little too early.

Stephen West: Why do you think his good friend Adam Smith refused to publish his work after his death? What do you think he was scared of happening?

Massimo Pigliucci: I think Adam Smith was a chicken. With all due respect, because he was in his own right actually a very good philosopher, but…

Stephen West: He was just a coward.

Massimo Pigliucci: Yeah, he was just a coward. He was just somebody who was very keenly aware of still the dangers in publishing the kind of stuff that Hume was writing and, therefore, also in editing it and becoming an instrument for publication. And, so, he just declined even though his best friend, apparently—or one of his best friends, at least—asked him to do so explicitly.

Stephen West: Now, let me just say, I completely apologize to anyone who’s a surviving member of the Adam Smith estate.

Massimo Pigliucci: [laughs]

Stephen West: I, look, I think that Adam Smith had a considerable amount of courage to completely overthrow mercantilism when he himself probably thought that it was based on corrupt relationships between chiefs of industry and the leaders of government.

Massimo Pigliucci: Yep.

Stephen West: I mean, that could have just as easily landed him in the stockade or—

Massimo Pigliucci: —Sure. Sure enough.—

Stephen West: —or burned at the stake.

Massimo Pigliucci: I guess he only wanted to take so many risks, right?

Stephen West: Yeah, true. His willpower was exhausted.

Alright, so, there’s that famous quote: you are the sum total of the five people that you spend the most time with. That’s you. Well, what happens with me is, whenever I spend a considerable amount of time reading one of these philosophers, I start to become them. Like, I start to pick up pieces of their personality. I start to feel like they’re a part of me in some weird way. My question to you is this. As someone who has read more than his fair share of David Hume over the years, has his thinking ever influenced you in your personal life? Has there ever been a life decision that you’ve had to make where you take a piece of Hume’s thinking, and you use it in a practical way?

Massimo Pigliucci: Oh, good question. So, first of all, you’re right. When you spend a lot of time with any author, really, not just philosophers but any author, you start, if not thinking like him or her, you certainly are deeply influenced, and it sort of becomes almost a second nature at least for the period that you’re devoting so much effort and time to that particular author. And actually, I think that that is one of the great things about philosophy in particular but also sort of about reading what used to be called the great books, that is you are in this constant conversation with people who are dead. And yes, they’re mostly white people who are dead. I don’t have a problem with that, and I assume that’s because I’m a white man myself. But nonetheless, I engage very willingly with anybody who had anything interesting to say regardless of gender and race. It just happened, of course, that to be the case that most of the canon in philosophy—in Western philosophy—is from a particular type of author.

Regardless of those considerations, that is one of the beautiful things about studying philosophy, that you do get into this constant conversation with some of the greatest minds that have come out of humanity. And it’s a privilege to meet, for me, to be able to do that as a profession. Therefore, I don’t need an excuse for it. If in the morning I get out of bed and have my coffee and crack Plato open or the stoics or David Hume, I’m doing my job. And it’s really a privilege.

Now, in terms of specific decisions, that’s an interesting question in and of itself. I can’t think of a specific decision, but I can definitely tell you that especially Hume’s dictum that we mentioned a few minutes ago of proportioning your beliefs to the evidence, that affects every decision that I make. That affects every conversation that I have. So, it’s really deeply entrenched in me at this point. So, right there is a tribute to this man who wrote this stuff 300 years ago. And he’s with me basically every day, even if I don’t read him every day.

Stephen West: Can you think of any exceptions to that? Like, are there any decisions that we make in life that run contrary to whatever empirical evidence is right in front of us at the time?

Massimo Pigliucci: I try not to. [laughs]

Stephen West: Yeah?

Massimo Pigliucci: I mean, even—of course, the obvious example would be, well, really, did you fall in love, for instance, because of the evidence? Well, yes! In some sense, absolutely. I mean, I know it sounds weird to put it that way. And certainly, you’re not necessarily thinking of it that way while it’s happening, because there’s a lot of emotion involved. By the way, Hume would appreciate that because he famously said that reason by itself, it doesn’t get you any motivation for action. In fact, he famously and provocatively said that reason is and ought to be the slave of passions. So, his point was that unless you actually care about something, unless you have emotional involvement with something, it doesn’t matter what reason tells you. Reason is instrumental, in his mind, to achieving your goals. And your goals are set by what you care about.

So, I think, actually, he would not be surprised by hearing me saying something like that. But yes, even things like falling in love and staying in love. Staying in a relationship is based on experience, on the fact that you see this person who actually cares for you and does things for you and talks to you and interacts with you on a regular basis. Now, if I were coming home and my partner were just clubbing me on the head every time that I got past the door, I would start having doubts.

Stephen West: Wait, she’s not supposed to do that?

Massimo Pigliucci: No, I don’t think so. [laughs]

Stephen West: I think this may be why I’m in a loveless marriage that’s crumbling beneath me right now. This is good to know. I should have proportioned my belief to the evidence.

Massimo Pigliucci: Exactly.

Stephen West: So, one more question, and then I’ll let you go. You can continue revolutionizing the philosophical world all by yourself. But I want to switch gears here for a second to your blog, the How to Be a Stoic blog. I feel like anything I say about it is going to be grotesquely inaccurate. I’m wondering, for the sake of me and for the audience, can you maybe talk a little bit about it and how you got into it and why you care about it so much?

Massimo Pigliucci: So, the blog is called How to Be a Stoic, which apparently is going to be the title of a book that I will be writing beginning next fall. I’m in contact with a number of publishers about this. And this came out, actually, of something sort of somewhat serendipitous. So, I’ve been practicing stoicism as a philosophy, as a practical philosophy, which is what it’s meant to be anyway, for a few months now. That’s because I just got more interested in it. I started reading more. There is a movement to bring back stoicism as an alternative to, let’s say, secular Buddhism or something like that for the modern mind, for the 21st century. So, I got interested in it. And I started reading and all that. And then I wrote an op-ed piece about it in The New York Times—and that piece was called “How to Be a Stoic”—in which I recounted my personal experiences, my version of stoic meditations, my version of stoic mindfulness, and so on and so forth.

And I didn’t think about it twice. I said, okay, this is going to be a nice little thing to do for The New York Times. It’s obviously something—it’s always an outlet that is always a pleasure to publish in. But I didn’t think this was going to be that much of a big deal. And then the following day the editor of The Times sends me this email and says, you know, “Massimo, your article is actually the most emailed article on the site.” And I said, “Wow, you mean on The Stone’s site?” because this came out in The New York Times philosophy blog which is called The Stone. And he said, “No, the entire New York Times site!” I said, “Wow! This many people are interested in sort of ancient philosophy? That’s something astonishing!” But even so, even at that point I said, okay, well that’s interesting. That’s good to know. Makes me feel better, and it made my day and all that. But then I sort of let it stay there, and within a few hours I got emails from a number of publishers asking me to turn that op-ed piece into a book. I said, okay, apparently there is a lot of interest about this stuff!

So, that’s what I’m doing. I’ve been working with my agent on this project, which I will start, as I said, probably in the fall because, actually, as it turns out, I have another book that I’m finishing in a moment for Chicago Press. So, then I thought, okay, why don’t we turn this into an ongoing project? I started the blog. And the blog is helping me, basically, sort of crystalizing my own ideas about stoicism, both ancient and modern. And of course, I figure, well, this could also be a good resource for other people interested. And sure enough, it’s working out that way. Basically, whenever I read something interesting, I put out some excerpts of my readings with a commentary on the blog. And then people come in and ask questions. I add their own comments. And it’s sort of an ongoing project. So, yeah, you’ll find it at howtobeastoic.org.

Stephen West: Was there a significant difference that you noticed between the way you felt pre-stoicism in your life versus post-stoicism in your life? Like, you can obviously remember a time in your life when you weren’t using stoic principles. If something bad happened to you, if that inevitable adversity came your way that the world throws you, the bonds of fate, what’s the difference between the way you’d react? How would you react then versus how would you react now? And what specific, actionable techniques would you recommend for somebody that’s trying to overcome a bout of adversity in their life right now?

Massimo Pigliucci: I can tell you that my friends and my partner have seen a significant change over the last few months since I started practicing stoicism. For one thing, I got much less irritable than I was before. And that’s because I really try to practice the stoic idea that there are some things that are entirely under your control, and that is how you react to things, how you think about things. There are other things that are not under your control. And then there are sort of things that are in between. And what you do with the things in between is you try your best to achieve certain results, but then, you know, whatever happens happens. And you try not to get upset about it. And it really does help.

You have to do it as a practice. You can’t just say that to yourself—what I just said—to yourself once, and then it’s done. You do it basically every day. Every day I write in my sort of philosophical diary, and I go over, like Seneca suggested and like Epictetus suggested, I go over what I did during the day and how I reacted. And I make a mental note of how to improve it the next time around. And it does improve, little by little, of course. And nobody’s perfect. But the stoics themselves will tell you, nobody’s ever going to reach the level of a sage, which was this sort of ideal that, however, never exists in any particular person that the stoics modeled themselves after. So, there is that.

There is also the fact that I always try to be somewhat the best ethical person that I can, I suppose. Let’s put it that way. And sort of be mindful of my choices, everyday choices. But since a large part of stoicism—a big part of stoicism is to be ethically mindful throughout the day about every decision you make. You’re always supposed to ask yourself, “Well, what are the ethical consequences of this thing?” So, I actually started doing that more systematically. And this has turned into immediate changes. For instance, I closed my bank account and opened a different one with a local bank because my previous bank was one of these large corporate outlets that had engaged in a number of clearly unethical practices. And so, I said, well, I don’t want to be associated. I don’t want to give my money to those people. So, I looked for a local credit union and that sort of stuff, and I changed my practice.

I also redoubled my efforts in sort of eating, for instance, in an ethical fashion. I was doing that already before. But this stoic idea, again, of sort of being constantly mindful of what you do and the implications of what you do has actually been very helpful. It’s now kind of second nature for me whenever I do something, whenever I have to make a decision, to say, well, what would the sage do? And, you know, what would Socrates do? Or something like that. And then I try to model myself afterwards, of course, imperfectly and with the usual failures of every human being. But nonetheless, at least you’re trying.

Stephen West: Massimo, you are truly a living legend. Check out his blog at howtobeastoic.wordpress.com. Thank you so much for your time.

Massimo Pigliucci: It was a pleasure.