Episode #064 - Transcript

Thank you for wanting to know more today than you did yesterday, and I hope you love the show.

So, I’ve been having this vision lately of somebody sitting at home listening to the last few episodes of this podcast angry at me, disappointed in the content—Kant-tent, content. By the way, in case you’re wondering, this is a perfect recipe for becoming a miserable person. When you’re at the level of misery—when you’re having hypothetical arguments with fictitious people in your head for days on end, like, that is next-level misery. But if there’s any saving grace, it’s not entirely an indictment of me being a crazy person. I mean, I’m not arguing with Napoleon in my head. This person in my head is emblematic of a type of person that actually exists out there, a person whose existence opens up a lot of interesting conversations when it comes to our episode today.

Now, for the sake of that conversation, let’s just call this person, I don’t know, Johnny. Johnny loves the Philosophize This! podcast. He listens to it every week. And whenever he does listen to it, he’s learned that the show can typically be broken down into two very distinct types of episodes. One is the kind of episode where we talk about things that are obviously useful in a practical sense. This could be any number of things: how our system of government should be structured, how it should be implemented; things like “What is it to live a good life?” Johnny loves these episodes, but he can’t help but notice that they’re often offset sporadically by a second type of episode, one where this Stephen West guy who looks like he's 13 years old is wasting Johnny’s time with a bunch of unverifiable, metaphysical speculation about the universe. These would be the episodes where we talk about various metaphysical systems: anything from Spinoza, Leibniz, Plotinus, Plato.

Point is, Johnny thinks that when we’re talking about all this stuff, when we’re talking about a near-infinity of tiny monads flurrying around everywhere that we have no empirical basis for believing in at all, what we’re essentially doing is just rambling about nonsense there, nonsense that has been dismantled by science over the years. And on one hand you can’t really blame him for feeling that way. You can’t really blame someone for feeling like their time’s being wasted when they hear rampant metaphysical speculation. I mean, after all, we’ve talked about a lot of it. If you just look at our history as a species, we come from a rich ancestral heritage of making these sorts of grandiose, unverifiable proclamations about the nature of existence, grandiose proclamations that have no doubt led us down some pretty dark, dark roads. And if you don’t think they’re dark roads, they’re at least roads where progress in other fields has been inhibited, right? You can’t really blame someone for being born into the late 80s, early 90s, into this great scientific age, and not having a ton of patience for theories like this. I mean, look at what they’ve done for us in the past. We need some sort of different criteria that we use to determine what is worth believing.

So, enough with the nonsense. Enough with all this speculation. Let’s use what is measurable and repeatable. Let’s use science to find the closest thing to truth, and then we can just forget about all these meaningless pontifications that people were making. But even if we could prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the systems of Spinoza or Leibniz or whoever are entirely false, even if we could do that, would it make the stuff that they’re talking about completely useless to us? I mean, should this hypothetical person, Johnny, just skip over the episodes on Plato or Plotinus? Should he just take out his earbuds and slam them down and feel like his time’s being wasted when he listens to those?

What I’m going to do on today’s episode is make a case for why I think these episodes are not entirely useless and how, ultimately, I think, the amount of value you get out of any piece of information that goes into your brain is usually determined by the amount of effort you’re willing to expend when processing that information. I mean, think about it, right? Two people can have virtually the exact same information fed into their heads and have two completely different outcomes for how that information affects the lens that they view the world through. For example, picture two people from the same small town. They’re both going off to college. They both load up all their belongings into their respective wagons. They get some extra wagon axels from the general store, some oxen to ford the river with. And they head off to the big city to the university to get a fancy education.

Now, one of those two people, they study really hard. They find ways to relate the information they’re learning at school to schemas they already had in their brain in the past. They’re passionate about the subjects they’re learning about. They cultivate social situations. They meet a wide range of people. They go out and they have the full college experience, top to bottom. Now, that person could easily return back to that small town after just four short years. And it’s not crazy to think that they might be almost an entirely different person.

Now, on the other hand, the other person could go to that same school and basically do nothing. They could essentially just lock themselves in their dorm room watching Netflix for four years. Maybe they’re not passionate about doing their classes. Maybe they just study for the test that’s at the end of that particular week, and then forget everything. Like, they cram the night before. Like, they have a test Friday morning, and by Friday afternoon that information that they crammed the night before has gone in one ear and just catapulted—doesn’t really impact them that much, right? Point is, this person could go back to that same small town, and after four years of doing that, they could be almost unchanged by their experience.

And in that sense, it’s not the information so much that makes something interesting or useful in a practical sense but the ways our brains process and relate that information to other things. If you read a book about Plato’s Timaeus and as you’re reading it you’re thinking, “Wow, this is really boring and useless to me,” then I’m going to go out on a limb and say that you probably have a pretty boring and useless way of looking at that information.

Now, that said, the same mentality could easily be conferred onto our episodes on Kant, right? I just—I see this Johnny guy sitting at home saying, “Okay, Kant. Okay. Okay, so there’s two worlds: the world of things in themselves and human experience of that world. So, if that is true, where does that leave me? I mean, on one hand, Kant’s saying that to even try to infer things about the world of things in themselves is a waste of time. And when it comes to the world of human experience, well, that just leaves me sitting here, sitting here with my earbuds in listening to some guy from the 17th century give his best guess of how the human mind experiences the world. What a giant waste of time. If I want to learn about that stuff, I’ll go and study science, right?”

“And by the way,” this guy’s thinking, “what use is that distinction practically speaking anyway? After all, what Hume said is still true. No matter how far you’re willing to go down this reductionist continuum, we still need some working method of interacting with the world, right? Why not use science?” I’m not saying that’s a bad option. If that’s what you decide to base your beliefs on, it’s perfectly fine. The question I’m asking is, is Kant’s famous distinction a boring or useless one to us? Is the idea that there are two worlds—the world as it actually is and the world of our biased, limited experience of that world—is that just the ramblings of a 17th-century Prussian monkey? Or maybe is there something useful to us in our everyday lives that we can garner from the idea that our subjective lens that we view the world through is not infallible?

This is a good question, I think, and I’m going to come back to it at the end of the show, but I want to give us some historical perspective on all this. And lucky for me, hey, the Enlightenment period that we’ve been talking about for so long is not just a period of massive growth in a lot of different areas of human thought; it’s also a period of massive growth in the field of something known as hermeneutics. Hermeneutics. Now, if you’ve never heard the word “hermeneutics” before, at first glance—or first earshot—it’s probably just a really weird, confusing-sounding word to you. “Like, what could this word be? Hermeneutics. Huh. Sounds like something foreign. Hermeneutics sounds like something far outside of my wheelhouse—you know, that place where I keep all my wheels and stuff.”

But what if I told you—what if I told you that every single person listening to this podcast right now engages in hermeneutics on a daily basis? What if I told you that you’re actually extremely familiar with hermeneutics, that you’re actually doing it right now as I’m saying this sentence to you? When people talk about somebody who’s engaging in hermeneutics traditionally, most of the time they’re referring to somebody who’s using methods and strategies to try to accurately interpret what was trying to be conveyed by people throughout history in books, scrolls, really any historical document. Typically, hermeneutics is somebody doing biblical exegesis. Typically, hermeneutics is somebody interpreting philosophy, etc. But it’s actually much, much bigger than that.

See, I like to think of hermeneutics as the art of interpretation. Maybe the best way for us to understand why hermeneutics is such a big deal at all is to think about how we personally interpret the world around us every day. Consider this for a second. You are an interpretation machine, basically. Just think about it. As you go about your day, every single day, you are interpreting everything around you. Everybody. Monday—interpret. Tuesday—interpret. Every day I’m interpreting! You are interpreting things constantly. But what are you actually doing when you interpret things in the world?

Well, I wouldn’t be so naïve as to presume to tell you what you’re doing when you interpret the world. All I can talk about is me, really. All I have access to is my own subjective experience. And what I do, personally, is I look at everything around me in a very, very narrow context, a context that I’ve arrived at after having the experiences that I have had thus far in my life. Like, have you ever watched the season finale of Grey’s Anatomy with your parents or friends? Really it doesn’t have to be Grey’s Anatomy. I don’t know why I said that. It could really be any show that has some sort of ambiguous ending to it. Like, have you ever watched a movie or a show with other people, and you come away from it at the end with different interpretations of what the artist meant to convey when they wrote that movie? Well, yeah, your dad thought this was the obvious meaning behind it. Your mom said, “No, no, no, I didn’t get that from it. I got this: Bruce Willis was dead the whole time.”

Whatever they say, the point is, where do these interpretations come from? Different people with different sets of experiences behind them can interpret the exact same information very differently. And while it’s all fun and games when we’re talking about Grey’s Anatomy or a movie, you can imagine how serious this interpretive task needs to be taken when we’re having one of these multi-thousand-year games of telephone going on and we’re trying to understand what somebody was trying to convey during their time period. Consider for a second that whenever someone writes down what they think is a world-changing idea, no matter who it is, if I’m reading that thing, the way that my brain processes and interprets that information could really be the difference between whether this information is lifechanging to me or whether I gloss over it like I read it on the back of a granola bar box.

What differentiates those two things? The prejudices and biases and very narrow collection of experiences that I’ve had over just a few decades on this planet shade every thought that I have. They distort everything that I read that was written by anyone else even in this culture and time period, let alone others. And look, when I say prejudices and biases, typically these words come along with a lot of negative connotation, like I’m telling you that because you hate black people, you’re not interpreting the world correctly. Well, even though that’s true, it’s not what I’m talking about here. I’m talking about biases that aren’t so culturally charged, biases that you have that we all have every day of our lives that are almost nothing but useful to you.

For example, if I’m walking down the street and I see a guy in an orange shirt, and he has neon-green reflective flare plastered all over him; he’s wearing a hardhat, and he’s using a big heavy rake and a hula-ho to till the soil and level it out in front of him; then obviously that guy is a construction worker that is prepping that area for some sort of future construction project, right? But see what I just did there? Obviously, that’s what he’s doing. Obviously, he’s a construction worker. But really there’s nothing obvious about what he’s doing at all. I mean, I may be right about what he’s doing. But the only reason I was right in this one interpretation is because of my collection of experiences, all my experiences having seen people in orange shirts and hardhats congregating around an unimproved plot of land, right?

I mean, imagine if an alien came down from a faraway galaxy, and he landed on that cul-de-sac. And he looked at that very same guy that I saw. Would it be obvious to that alien that he was prepping the area for construction, that he was a construction worker? No, the alien would rightfully be confused. This guy could be doing any number of things. It’s not obvious what he’s doing. The alien might think he’s exercising or something. Like, “This is earth’s greatest cardio routine I’ve come across!” Maybe it would think that he’s doing some sort of interpretive dance. Maybe the alien would come down, and it would even think it’s obvious given the matching orange-and-green costumes and all the matching hats of the construction workers. Obviously, this is some sort of Cirque de Soleil show going on.

Now, if that seems ridiculous, just imagine if you and I could get on a spaceship and we could go to that alien’s home planet, look around, take it all in. How arrogant and misguided would it be to look around their culture, their world, and pretend that we know exactly what’s going on in a world and culture that is completely unfamiliar to us? Even if we had time to stick around for a while and just really try to understand the way that the aliens lived, everything about us would be looking at their world and trying to understand their world better by comparing it to things in our world. We would be projecting these relics of our culture and time period onto their culture and place in the universe.

This goes even down to the most basic things: down to what motivates each alien, what motivates the race as a whole, even down to the questions the aliens even think are worth asking at all. But on the other hand, what can you do? This is what we are: interpretation machines constantly trying to make comparisons, constantly trying to connect things. When we look back 2,300 years and we try to understand exactly what Plato meant when he wrote every word that he wrote, when we read a translation of a translation of a translation and we try to have a conversation using something that was etched into a scroll before Alexander the Great was even born, we are essentially traveling to an alien planet.

Right around this time that we’ve been talking about, there was philosopher who lived who is widely considered to be the first great philosopher of hermeneutics in the modern era. His name was Friedrich Schleiermacher. Schleiermacher points out like many people before him that one of the biggest challenges someone faces when trying to understand the intent of an author behind a piece of work is understanding the true meaning of the words that they were using, which is enough of a headache in itself. But Schleiermacher points out that a big piece of doing that that’s often overlooked by people is understanding even seemingly insignificant characteristics about the author themself, even down to the character and personality of the author. These things come into play. The state of mind of the author while writing the work comes into play.

Now, I don’t want to get too far into it. Hermeneutics turns into a lot more than this. I don’t want to spoil Schleiermacher too much because we’re probably going to do a much larger episode on hermeneutics in the future. But the main takeaway is that we want to think that because these people walked on two legs and that because we can relate to some sort of underlying humanity in their work that we’re somehow experts on exactly what they meant when they wrote something. At least that’s something that I do sometimes. But it’s far from the case. Schleiermacher famously defined hermeneutics as the art of avoiding misunderstanding. It’s so easy to project our own biases onto people from the past when we don’t fully understand the cultural and historical context that they were writing in the midst of.

Oh, and by the way, this is not something that we reserve just for people in the past. We do it to each other in our present day all the time. If you’ve ever had a misunderstanding in a conversation, then you’ve witnessed firsthand the sort of agony, agony that bad hermeneutics has wrought. See, because while most people hear the word “hermeneutics,” and they think of their dad’s hermeneutics—you know, old, educated, white guys in those clever, colorful hats interpreting the Bible for the Catholic Church. Even though that’s what most people do, in a sense, we are all, every one of us, practitioners of hermeneutics. We are all, in our own right, different collections of experiences interacting with each other and interpreting each other.

Some of us are better at interpreting things than others. It’s definitely a skill that’s learned is what I’m saying. We all exist personally at some point on this hermeneutics-skill-level continuum. At the top are the people that are super bright: the people that do exegesis for a living, people that work at NASA, all the fine folks at Google. At the bottom of this continuum are people that have next to zero critical thinking ability: infants, a jar of mayonnaise, Bill O’Reilly—you know, things at that level. My point is this: your interpretive ability creates your reality. Our lives are a collection of fleeting emotional states that are largely shaped by how we interpret the world around us.

And when you look at it that way, are there many things out there that are more important than how well or accurately we interpret the world around us? In fact, in fact, if you want to take it one step further, just knowing, just having knowledge about that separation that your experiences create—just knowing that you have a very narrow collection of life experiences that are unquestionably useful when it comes to identifying construction workers but probably not very good at understanding exactly what’s going on around you all over the world, it seems like acknowledging that there’s a difference between your world of experience and the world as it truly is somewhere out there, seems like that could bring you a lot of comfort.

Remember that guy living in my head named Johnny? So, it would be very easy for Johnny to be born into the late 80s, early 90s, into a world where we have this long history of being misled by unverifiable speculation about metaphysics—to be born into a world where science does so many great things for people, to be born into a world where it’s possible to hold your beliefs to what seems to be a higher standard—it’d be easy to be born into that world and then to take a giant leap from there and label all of these systems—the systems of Berkeley or Plotinus or Spinoza—label them all a complete waste of time; to angrily slam down his headphones the moment he hears that the next episode is not something that’s immediately practically useful.

Sometimes the most profound and useful nuggets of all aren’t just lying on the ground somewhere where everyone can see them. Sometimes you have to do a little digging. Sometimes you have to buy one of those weird metal detectors and walk around on the beach every Sunday in your visor so that one day you can have your glorious moment in the sun where you hold up some poor woman’s lost wedding ring and celebrate on a late-night infomercial.

I’m speaking metaphorically, of course. But how ironic that if Johnny had labelled Kant’s famous distinction of the episode that we did on it as just another useless rambling by an 18th-century moron, man, he would have missed out on the very lesson that could have prevented him from making that choice in the first place.

Thank you for listening. I'll talk to you next time.