Questions & Answers, Vol. 1

I regularly receive messages from readers and viewers, and most have two things in common: they contain a question, and I do not have time to answer that question. I wish I were a bit more like Noam Chomsky, able to answer each and every message I receive, but I don’t have it in me. I’ve started compiling them into a list; every so often I’ll answer those questions here.

I’m modifying the wording of these questions a bit for clarity, brevity, and generality. If the questioner gave me permission, I’ve included their name here.

From Tricia: Western philosophy seems to focus on the mind, while Eastern philosophies have more of focus on body and mind. How do we reconcile these two ways of thinking?

The first step is to question whether or not this is true. A slogan I repeat to myself often, and which I hope everyone will eventually acknowledge, is that all generalizations are simplifications. We necessarily lose detail when we attempt to take such a wide view of both Western and Eastern philosophy. While the terms Western and Eastern are useful starting points, the more you learn about the traditions the less and less helpful you will find them.

But there is a broader point, which is that there are strands of Western thought, maybe even the majority of them, which are very, shall we say, heady. They don’t seem to think too much about the down-in-the-muck business of being a human being with a body. Descartes is everyone’s favorite example here; I’ll leave it to you to decide if that is fair.

The best way to start reconciling this, I would suggest, is to find examples in the West that aren’t quite so heady. There was at one point a lot of feminist philosophy done on criticizing a ‘Cartesian’ way of viewing the self; I think Parfitt’s work on personal identity, in a very roundabout way, might help too; Heidegger seems very heady, but so much of his work is about how we actually live. Turning also to work on phenomenology and philosophy of mind, with an emphasis to embodied cognition, might help. You’d then want to do the same for Eastern philosophy — find the ones that emphasize the mind more and see how they criticize their fellow Eastern philosophers.

It would be a start.

As an aside, it would be worth thinking about this with Aristotle. Yes, Aristotle does think that the theoretical life is the highest life. But does that mean he ignores the body? I don’t think so — I think he takes it for granted that we’ll take care of our bodies before proceeding to other things.

What other YouTube channels do you enjoy?

There are two sorts of answers to this question. There are channels that I view as roughly similar to me in either style, content, or mission, and there are channels that I watch for fun.

For the former, I would recommend Ryan Chapman, who makes lengthy videos on politics and history.

I’d also recommend Then & Now, especially their lengthy doc-style videos about philosophers like Spinoza, Hegel, and Kant; Alex O’Connor has interesting interviews; Fads is a friend who takes on similar topics as me (when I veer into more social criticism/social science kinds of content), and he’s very talented.

For fun, recently I’ve watched quite a few videos from JHS Pedals (I’ve been expanding my guitar pedal collection), Phil Edwards, and Answer in Progress.

I also really enjoyed this song:

Where do you get your news?

I subscribe to the New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and the Austin-American Statesman. I don’t read the paper every day, nor do I subscribe to many newsletters from those publications; I just don’t have the time, and in general I don’t think that we should consume as much news as people seem to think that we do. I mostly read longer, in-depth pieces from those publications, as well as from publications like the Texas Tribune and Texas Monthly for news from the Lone Star State.