Episode #069 - Transcript

Hello, everyone. I’m Stephen West. This is Philosophize This!

So, I know no one out there even cares out my long-winded apologies for anything that I ever do. So, I guess I won’t apologize here. I just want to tell you a brief story, my friends—come around the fire—a story that will explain this episode a little. Bottom line is, I’m trying to turn over a new leaf. Alright, people? I made a New Year’s resolution in the middle of August. I made a mid-year’s resolution. My resolution was that I care about you guys. And because of that, I wanted to release a new episode of this show each and every week. Every week for the rest of the year without exception. I want you guys to have stuff from this show to listen to every week. Now, that said, I released the last episode of this show six days ago. And literally the rest of that evening and every day since then I have been working on the episode that I wanted to release today. It’s a fantastic episode. It’s on Kant, Hegel, and Schleiermacher, their differing opinions on the philosophy of religion, the moral law, whether a moral order is imbued into the cosmos or not, whether we can even know that. It’s one of my favorite episodes I’ve ever done.

The only problem is, it’s 85% done. So, I had a choice at that point. I could release nothing today and give you that episode a few days later. Or I could at least give you something today and not fail miserably at my mid-year’s resolution. A couple ideas. A friend of mine said I should do a best-of show. Do a best-of show! Do it! Not a fan of that idea, personally. I don’t think many of you guys would be either. I mean, I’ve been doing this podcast for two and a half years, and there’s only like, what, 70-something episodes. I’m more in the business of quality over quantity. And how pretentious, by the way, would it be for me to make the claim that I know what the best moments of the show are. If I ever actually do that, I will punch myself in the face. Just remind me over Twitter, of course. That said, what I can do—a better idea in my opinion to tide you over until the next episode comes out in a few days—is to sort of cultivate a few moments from the show that are not necessarily the best ever, but extremely useful moments when it comes to understanding this next episode that’s notoriously difficult to get a handle on. It’s kind of the reason it’s only 85% done despite the work that I’ve put into it.

So, no apologies from me right now. I’m not apologizing for anything. I’m just explaining to you guys what’s going on instead of what typically happens: you guys just get left in the dark wondering where the new episode is, and you just got to wait for it for a few days. At least you get something, something that’s another exposure to some big ideas that will make the next episode that much more fun for you.

That said, today I’d like to present to you two very important segments from this show. One is from the episode on belief. Another is from the episode “What is Enlightenment?” I hope you guys enjoy, and I’ll see you very soon.

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So, the very best episodes of the Philosophize This! podcast, at least in my opinion, are the ones that correspond with some event that’s going on in my personal life that week. My research for the show quickly goes beyond just reading a bunch of dry philosophy books. I don’t just get a handful of books, lock myself in the nearest closet with a flashlight, and emerge in a couple days with a brand-new podcast episode. No. Usually I read what I need to read, and then I like to mull it over for a little while. I like to go on walks or hikes thinking about it. I like to arrive at a few core questions that I can address in that show for that week. And when I arrive at those questions, the first thing I do—because I’m a tremendously annoying person outside of the podcast—is I begin to subject everybody around me to those questions. Anybody that seems even remotely interested in what we’re talking about for that week, I start to ask them what they think about it. It helps me arrive at a more unbiased, vibrant, multicultural account of what we’re talking about.

And the big question for this week—it was a very difficult week for this—the question was “Why do you believe what you believe?” How do you justify believing in what you believe in? Now, you can imagine the kind of reception I get asking people this stuff. Why do people get so uncomfortable when you ask them to explain why they believe what they believe? For a long time I was confused by this. I didn’t know why. And look, I just want to make it clear, I’m not being aggressive in these conversations. I’m not trying to change what people believe. They actually don’t have a problem most of the time. It’s just on certain issues they have a very uncomfortable ambiance about them when it comes to explaining why they believe what they believe.

And then I realized something. I am fighting a losing battle here against society. When it comes to what people believe about stuff, at least in modern-day American society, we’re not supposed to ask people why they believe certain things that they believe. It’s actually an incredible double standard. There’s certain beliefs we’re supposed to ridicule relentlessly. If someone is a racist, you’re supposed to vilify them, just lambaste them in public. You’re supposed to hang them up in the town center in one of those village idiot wooden things. If someone’s a communist, you’re supposed to show them the error of their ways. You’re supposed to convince them of the superiority of capitalism and a representative republic and democracy. But when it comes to other beliefs that are actually incredibly similar to those if you think about it, we’re not supposed to ask people why they believe what they believe. Social conventions have created this sort of protective cocoon for people on certain issues where they don’t really need to step outside of what’s comfortable for them to explain.

Well, just for today’s episode, just for the next 30 to 40 minutes, let’s step out of that protective cocoon. Let’s transform into a butterfly. Just for the show today, let’s examine our beliefs, find out how we justify them. And then at the end of the show, if you’re uncomfortable, you can go right back into that cocoon. It’s not going anywhere. What do you guys say?

Alright, now, earlier in the week, I was having an absolutely perfect conversation for this very topic. I was talking to a friend of mine. This guy believes in ghosts, alright? Now, I want to come back to this guy, but first I want to unpack the idea of belief a little bit. Because what I think we’ll all realize soon—and it’s something that Voltaire definitely would have agreed with—is that this strange condition that we’re born into, this crazy carnival ride that we’re on that we call life, when it comes to belief, it all begins to look like a really sick joke that something’s playing on us. And let me explain why.

When we’re born into the world, we’re born into a very strange condition. There you go. I’m repeating myself again. When it comes to arriving at beliefs about stuff, there are two giant things that are in our way, two giant things about this condition that we find ourselves in that make believing in anything a very complicated task. The first thing—a very important thing—is that certainty, for all intents and purposes, is impossible. In fact, we can’t even be certain about the fact that certainty is impossible. You know, that’s the great paradox of skepticism. But if certainty is possible, it seems very clear that finding it through all these various handicaps that we have—our senses and our feeble human brains—it seems like that’s a wild goose chase.

Voltaire had a famous quote. He said, “Doubt is an unpleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.” This was a fanfare of the Enlightenment period, but it was Voltaire who said it initially. Now, what Voltaire and many of the Enlightenment thinkers are getting at here is that you don’t know anything for certain. You may think that you know things for certain, but you don’t. You may have a very strong belief about something. And that belief may be backed up by very, very strong evidence that constantly supports it. And that could be constantly reinforced by your experience and the world that you live in. And you still don’t know that thing for certain, okay?

For example, let’s take one of the most seemingly obvious things that exists in the world, at least to me—the physical world. I look around me right now, and it seems like all of this stuff exists. It seems like this table exists, that the rug exists, that humans exist all around me that I’m actually talking to. To me, it seems clear based on my experience that I’m not just suspended in blackness right now talking to myself. But do I know for certain that all of this stuff exists? On that same note, do I know for certain that I exist? Do I know for certain that I’m a thinking thing like Descartes said, you know, his famous cogito, ergo sum? I think, therefore I am. The clear and distinct idea that he starts all of his QED stuff from is, “I am a thinking thing. I exist.” But is that for certain? Well, a lot of people would argue, no. They point to the famous Cartesian circle, the idea that his clear and distinct ideas could have been deceived from the very beginning. So, Descartes really doesn’t know anything for certain.

So, if we don’t know anything for certain, what does all of this mean? What are the implications of this if that is true? Well, here it is. To believe in anything, to claim to know anything no matter the amount of empirical data or reasoning that’s at your disposal, is a leap of faith. Even something as imminently in front of us at all times like the physical world with a seemingly endless amount of evidence that we could pull from to reinforce its existence, if you claim to know that it exists for certain, well, just send me an email. I’ll open up my phone. I’ll call an idealist philosopher. You guys can sit down and have a Starbucks, and about 10 minutes later he’s going to convince you that you’re making a lot of assumptions about this world that you don’t even realize you were making before you talked to him. The point of this is that to believe in anything is a leap of faith.

But I want to take a step back right here because this is a very common point where people make a very easy logical leap: that because everything is a leap of faith at some level, that that, therefore, makes all leaps of faith equal or all beliefs the exact same thing. It’s far from the truth. We may be making leaps of faith all the time whenever we believe something, but all leaps of faith are not created equal. And this brings me to the next very strange thing about this condition that we’re born into as human beings. We can believe literally anything that we want to believe. Just think about that. Consider that we can believe anything. And what I mean by that is what you believe has absolutely nothing to do with how true it is.

Now, this is something that’s very obvious to some people and not so obvious to other people. Other people think, “Well, no, I believe in things and all humans believe in things because they think it’s the truth, right? There’s no other reason why people believe things.” Well, if you doubt that the truth is not connected to beliefs and things at any level, just consider the fact that there are millions of examples I could give you right now of people that hold mutually exclusive beliefs about things where it’s impossible for both of them to be correct about them.

In fact, consider the fact that some people believe in ghosts, okay? Now, I’m going to come back to that conversation I had earlier in the week with my friend. He was telling me about the most recent installment in the horror movie genre: it’s called Annabelle. I saw the movie. It’s the movie about the creepy doll that is possessed by a demon. And for future listeners, I’m sorry if this dates the show. I’m sorry if this example is not relevant to you, but it’s the same generic story of, you know, there’s an attractive young couple. They get some new material possession that unfortunately gets claimed by Satan’s henchmen or some other demon entity. I’m almost positive no matter how far in the future you’re listening to this, there’s going to be some new movie that is still appealing to these fears that people have. So, just replace Annabelle with whatever movie is prevalent during your time period.

But what this guy was doing is he was telling me about the doll from Annabelle apparently is based on actual events, that there was this young couple that got this doll, and that they would leave and go and do stuff. They’d come back from the supermarket, and the doll had changed positions throughout the house. And one night they were laying in bed, and the door ominously creaked open. And the doll was standing there. And it jumped up onto the bed, and it tried to strangle the woman’s husband to death. Very scary.

Well, look, in fairness to me, I thought he was joking, okay? I started making fun of it, started poking at holes in the story and really just talking about the whole general situation that he’s talking about. Just that there exists an underworld where demons are holding human souls captive and that one of the lords of this underworld decides to take a liking to this young, attractive couple’s baby. He wants her soul for all of eternity. So, his best plan is to take control of this creepy-looking doll and just mess with them for weeks. Because he doesn’t actually just take her soul. He spends weeks upon weeks just flicking the lights on and off, moving curtains in the corner just to mess with them, putting the doll in random places when they leave the house, opening doors when no one’s around just for the camera to see. This is what the demon spends his time doing. This is what one of the lords of the underworld is doing with his time.

And look, really, I mean, don’t get me wrong. I’m completely open to the idea of all this stuff existing. I’m an agnostic when it comes to demons and ghosts and evil spirits at least at this point in my life. It certainly would make the world a much more interesting place. But in the context of this conversation, I try to make people laugh. And when I pointed this stuff out, the guy just looks at me and goes, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. You don’t believe that this happened? What? Why don’t you believe that this happened?” Now, although I’m an agnostic on the issue, I’ve heard people that believe in the exact opposite of this guy all throughout my life. They say ghosts definitely do not exist. They’ll say, “We live in the smartphone age. Everybody has a camera sitting right in their back pocket. If these things truly are as prevalent as these people say, why wouldn’t somebody have gotten one on camera, you know? Where’s the video evidence?”

When they’re asked to explain why so many people claim to have these experiences, they say these people are nothing more than superstitious people with a confirmation bias. They say that they’ve been told from a very early age that they have a spirit or a soul. Maybe their mother tells them a story about a time when she was young and she saw her mother at the foot of her bed. This concept of souls and a spirit realm existing is constantly reinforced in their head. So, when they’re told about demons existing or about a ghost haunting a certain property line in downtown Philadelphia, the idea of that happening is not that outside of what they’ve been told is acceptable to believe. So they just believe it.

One of the common arguments against it is, you know, if you told these same people that there were goblins sitting up in the trees constantly watching them, they would never believe you. But in reality, goblins and ghosts are equally as unfounded and ridiculous. It’s just that ghosts correspond more with what they’ve been told is acceptable, so they believe it. Some people vehemently believe in ghosts. Some people vehemently don’t believe in ghosts. But who is right?

Well, one thing’s for certain, they can’t both be right. The two viewpoints directly contradict each other. One of them or neither of them has to be right. They can’t both be right. Yet both sides are devout believers in their side of the operation. The point of this, aside from setting up the extended example of ghosts, is to illustrate that someone believing in something has nothing to do with how true it is. We can believe in anything we want to believe. And it’s funny because if you asked 100 people why they believe the things they do, 99 of that 100 people would say that they believe things because it’s the truth. “Maybe complete certainty about things is impossible, but what I believe is the closest facsimile of truth possible. We all believe the things that we believe because we think it’s the closest thing to truth that we’ve come across so far.”

Well, like most things in philosophy, I truly wish it was this simple. Because if you press those 99 out of 100 people hard enough, what you’re inevitably going to find is that they believe in things for a lot of reasons. And not many of them have anything to do with the truth, necessarily. Look, I’m not making this up, okay? The dozens of different justifications for believing in something is an entire area of philosophy today. There are so many ways that people distort reality to try to convince themselves that something is true that you could literally turn off the podcast right now, and you could spend the rest of your life reading books about all the different ways that people distort reality to convince themselves of stuff. People believe things because they’re convenient to believe in. People believe things because it's useful to them on a personal level. They believe things out of laziness, anything. Look, it’s very difficult to accept reality on reality’s terms. So, leave it to us to come up with tons of creative ways to believe in something and create the reality that we want to exist.

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When we’re born, we realize very quickly that we were born into a world where the nature of existence is very finite. I mean, at best, and I mean at best, we only have two parents, two parents with a very limited set of experiences themselves. Most of the time the way that these two people live their life—they’re really just doing the best they can every day. They’re not out there trying to cure cancer. They’re just trying to get through another shift at the factory without wanting to off themselves. As children, we don’t have some infinite bookshelf that spans off into the horizon to pull from. No, we have a limited number of books to read, a limited number of cartoons to watch, a limited number of church services to attend, relatives to consult, etc.

One thing’s for sure, Kant would say, our childhood never consists of us walking around the playground when we’re five years old a Socrates, right? Some immensely educated, wise, enlightened being. It’s never like that. But it shouldn’t be that way anyway, right? I mean, on the other hand, that’s one of the great things about being a kid. You got nothing to worry about. You ask so many adults to recount the greatest moments in their life, and how often do they cite some time in their life when they had zero obligations? How often do adults sit there in the car and tell their kids, “Oh, you think you got it bad as a kid? Wait until you have all the stresses of adulthood. Then you’re really going to have it bad. Wait until you have all the bills. Wait until you have all the commitments. Wait until you have all the people that you’re beholden to: a boss every single day. You better enjoy being a kid while you can.”

Not to mention the fact that when you’re a kid, your life is pretty stress-free because whenever you have a problem, there’s always a very clear solution to what that problem is. You have at your disposal as a kid, essentially, two omniscient oracles of the universe that you can go to with any problem, and they instantly have a solution for you. Their names are Mom and Dad. I mean, you go to the playground; you get a booboo on your foot. You come up to Mom; you say, “I got a booboo.” She looks at it. She puts some Neosporin and a Band-Aid—she has the answer to the problem. They know exactly what to do about it. Someone is mean to you at school. You come home; you tell them what they said. They know exactly how to handle that problem next time.

There’s comfort in having that resource. There’s comfort in knowing that you have someone to solve the problems for you. On that same note, I’ve know people that have quit their job in the corporate world, and they think that being their own boss is going to be the greatest thing that’s ever happened to them. But the flipside of that is, when you’re your own boss, when there’s a big problem that comes up, you’re the only guy that can make that decision. You’re the person that decides whether that problem sinks or swims. There’s comfort in having the resource of having someone to go to and ask what the best course of action is so that you’re not the only one making the decision that might potentially fail.

Here's what I’m getting at. When we become adults, bad stuff still might happen to you five minutes from now. You still may get the booboo on your foot. Except this time the booboo on your foot might be that your house is getting foreclosed on. This time it might be that your liver is shutting down. You need medication. You need surgery or something. Bad stuff still happens. It’s still terrifying to not know the future. So, what do we do about it? How can we be sure that none of this bad stuff’s ever going to happen to us?

Well, this is where Kant comes in. Kant says that as children what we do is we outsource different components of our life to other people. We need to by means of necessity. I mean, literally, when we get a booboo on our foot, we’ve never had that problem before. It’s one of the worst things that has ever happened to us. We don’t know what to do. We outsource the solution to the problem to somebody else, our parents. But we become dependent on this process. We become dependent on not thinking for ourselves. It feels good. It feels so good, Kant says, that we extend this way of doing business into adulthood. I mean, think about it. There’s no rite of passage between childhood and adulthood, right? There’s no magic ceremony that takes place where we go from not capable of thinking for ourselves to capable of thinking for ourselves. No, we just live one continuous existence. So, at what point do we make the decision to start thinking for ourselves and not just do the best imitation of whatever our parents or the people around us are doing?

When Kant says, “Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity,” what he’s saying is that most people find so much comfort and ease in this lifestyle—this lifestyle of outsourcing your thoughts on everything to the people around you during childhood—that they just never stop doing it. They turn 18, and they find a college professor to think for them. They turn 21, and they find charismatic radio personalities. They turn 40, and they find hacky cable news commentators. They live their lives seeing themselves as autonomous adults, but just think of what they’re doing here. Think about that. They’re outsourcing their entire life to other people. Kant says, “It’s so easy to be immature. If I have a book to serve as my understanding, a pastor to serve as my conscience, a physician to determine my diet for me, and so on, I need not exert myself at all. I need not think, if only I can pay: others will readily undertake the irksome work for me.”

Just listen to the first line of that. “It’s so easy to be immature.” It’s easy. It’s so easy to find, you know, to go down to Barnes & Noble and find a single book on a subject: memorize a few taglines, a few insights from it. And then whenever the topic comes up in conversation, ah, well, you just parrot whatever this author said, and you pass it off as your own thoughts. It's so easy to outsource your understanding to people. Now, on that same note, it’s so easy to just go to church on Sunday, memorize a few taglines and insights from what a pastor told you is the correct way to act. And then whenever you’re faced with a moral dilemma or a difficult choice to make about what the right decision is, ah, well, you just parrot whatever the pastor said on Sunday, and you pass it off as your own decision.

It’s so easy to outsource your conscience in this way. The nutrition example—it’s so easy to find a nutrition guru, find some website that tells you everything you’re doing wrong with your diet. They lay out exactly what you should eat at exactly this time. And this is why you’re feeling lethargic right now, and this is why you have energy at this time. Then whenever someone asks you for diet advice you just parrot whatever that nutrition guru guy said on the internet.

What I’m saying is, it’s so easy to outsource every element of your life and allow someone else to think for you. Kant talks about how funny this contradiction is. People claim to love this idea of freedom. They claim to love this idea of truly being able to exercise their ability to choose, Kant says, to have a say in the matter. But how many of us just find someone else to outsource our thinking to and then wash our hands of the process of ever using our brains to think? Kant says that people love to talk about it. People love to talk about how much they love freedom. But this immaturity, this extension of their childhood, this looking to others for your own thoughts—it’s a cage that we trap ourselves in. It’s a self-imposed cage. It’s a cage where you never think for yourself, where you’re constantly at the mercy of whatever people you arbitrarily decided to believe at the time.

And it’s crazy because it comes down to complete randomness sometimes, right? Like, you’re walking through Barnes & Noble, and that happened to be the book that was right there on the table. That happened to be the nutrition website that came up in your search engine results. That happened to be the church that was the closest to your house. It’s a self-incurred cage of immaturity that we put ourselves in.

Now, there’s good news to this. If this is getting depressing, there’s good news. The key to that cage right now is hanging around your neck. The key out of this cage is around everyone’s neck, but they don’t use it. They choose not to. And Kant says, it’s not a death sentence, right? It’s not like we stay in this self-incurred state of immaturity because we’re somehow incapable of getting out of it. It’s not that people are too stupid to get out of it. It’s not a lack of understanding of how to get out of it. But Kant says, the reason why they don’t is always one of two things. The first one is that they’re comfortable where they’re at. Remember, he said it in the first quote: “It’s so easy to be immature.”

So, what inevitably happens is, people take the key from around their neck in this cage; they leave the cage for a while, and they just can’t handle it. It’s too much. Kant says, they start thinking for themselves for the first time, and it’s like they’re using this muscle that they’ve never used before. It’s incredibly uncomfortable. It’s atrophied. They’ve never used this part of their brain before. It reminds me of Plato’s allegory of the cave. But it’s kind of like that scene out of The Matrix when Neo first emerges into the real world, and he’s opening his eyes for the first time. He’s asking Morpheus, “Why do my eyes hurt?” “You’ve never used them before, Neo.” I’m paraphrasing there, but you get what I’m saying.

Kant says that what happens is, people usually just out of laziness retreat back into the cage, letting other people think for them because it’s so comfortable. It’s so much more difficult to think for yourself. There’s so many incredible quotes that he gives in his response to Zöllner. He said, “It is because of laziness and cowardice that so great a part of humankind, after nature has long since emancipated them from other people’s direction, nevertheless gladly remains minors…For it is so comfortable to be a minor! …He has even grown fond of it.”

Now, as you probably heard in the quote that I just read, the second reason Kant gives for why people keep themselves in this cage is cowardice. They lack the courage to ever stand up and use their intellect. Now, at first glance this may seem strange. They lack the courage? Seems counterintuitive. Why would someone lack the courage to use their brain as much as they can? Why would it be scary to use your brain? At first, I didn’t get it, at least. Well, think back to why Kant thinks we started thinking this way in the first place. It’s because we were kids, right? When you’re a kid, it actually is really scary to think for yourself. I mean, what if something bad happens that you’ve never seen before? I’ve never been here before. I don’t know anything.

What Kant’s saying is that that fear that you have that drives you in that moment in childhood, that fear doesn’t just magically leave you the moment you throw the graduation hat up in the air. There’s no rite of passage. I mean, think about it. It’s scary to think for yourself. “What if I’m wrong? What if that terrible thing happens to me that I’ve always been thinking about? What if I do this whole process of thinking for myself, and then people reject me, and they think I’m an idiot, and I’m cast out into the woods, and I don’t have a tribe anymore?” This is a big deal to consider, you guys. Just because you read books and you listen to educational podcasts, that doesn’t mean you love to think about stuff necessarily, right?

I’m sure we all know someone like this. you could just be reading books to have thoughts to recite when someone asks you a question. That’s not you loving to think about stuff. That’s fueled by insecurity. “Oh my god, what if somebody asks me a question and I don’t have an answer to it? I better listen to these podcasts and get an answer to it.” That’s fear driving you. But Kant says, we can’t let this fear of failure or negative judgment or anything enslave us for our entire lives. There’s far too much at stake.

Kant has some words for somebody that might be in this place that can’t muster the courage to take the leap to think for themselves. He says, “The danger is not in fact so great, for by a few falls they would eventually learn to walk; but an example of this kind makes them timid and usually frightens them away from any further attempt.” What Kant’s saying here is, what if when you’re a baby you just never learned to walk because whenever you stood up to try to walk, you fell over, and that made you have an aversion to the whole process? Like, what if when you were a baby, you were trying to learn to walk. You stand up; you fall over. You stand up; you fall over. What if at that point you just gave up? What are you going to do for the rest of your life? Are you going to ride around on a Hoveround the rest of your life? No, that’s ridiculous. No, you keep trying. You stand up; you fall over until you succeed. You learn the skills you need to walk. This is the same process as that.

Remove yourself from your self-incurred immaturity, Kant says. Think for yourself. Fail, fail, fail again. And eventually you will learn to walk. Have the courage to remove yourself from this self-incurred immaturity and not outsource your thinking to everyone around you. Kant says, this should be a trumpet that is sounded all throughout the land. The motto and slogan of the Enlightenment should be that we should dare to be wise. Dare to be wise. See, that implies that there’s something holding us back. We need to be courageous enough to be wise, to not cower in the corner, terrified. “What if we’re wrong? What if we fall over a couple times? What if it hurts?” No, we will fall over. It will hurt a little. We will learn our lessons. But one thing we will not be willing to do ever again is spend another thousand years outsourcing our thinking to whatever dogma arbitrarily lands in our lap.

Now, if this all sounds very abrasive and engaging to you, keep in mind, this was occasionally Kant’s style. It’s been said about Kant by people before that he didn’t teach people philosophy; he taught them to philosophize.

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