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This is KZSU Stanford.
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Welcome to entitled opinions.
My name is Robert Harrison.
We're coming to you from the Stanford Cabs.
That's right.
Coming to you from the Stanford campus.
And while entitled opinions streams your way like starlight
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carrying us along in its expanding body.
With its billions of galaxies,
its untold crush of stars,
its legions of planetary spheres.
Each one of which hangs there in desolate infinity,
remote and isolated,
rotating, spinning, sometimes swerving or falling,
never touching any neighboring sphere,
illuminated by borrowed light,
if at all,
a moat in what we call the visible universe.
But only a tiny fraction of which is actually visible.
The rest of it drifting in an inscrutable sea of dark matter,
surrounded by vast eddies of dark energy,
known to us not in themselves,
but only by conjecture,
because nothing makes sense without them.
Do we really want to cleanse the doors of perception
and see things the way they truly are?
Infinite?
That would blast our finite minds into nothingness.
For our minds cannot bear very much reality.
Thank you, T.S. Eliot.
That's right.
The greater part of reality surrounds us silently,
and we are most likely invisibly.
We see tiny islands, but not the ocean of being.
And if you don't believe me,
just ask the guests who joins me today in the studios of KZSU.
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I promise.
It's a pleasure.
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Warning.
The following is an unadulterated, unusually concentrated intellectual discussion.
It should be avoided by anyone who does not have a high tolerance for thinking.
If you're allergic to the exchange of ideas,
if you're deficient in curiosity,
if you suffer from anti-intellectualism,
then please tune out now.
In title opinions promotes the narcotic of intelligent conversation,
takes us into the garden and seats us at the banquet of ideas,
where we feast on angel bread.
Clear and distinct thinking, intuitive analysis,
and an aversion to analytic philosophy,
we bring them all to bear on the pursuit of self-knowledge.
We'll see you on the other side.
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That's for stay on right.
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As you all timers know, every few years,
the FDA requires us to send out that warning to our listeners.
And now, without further ado,
I would like to welcome our guests to the program,
because we have a lot to discuss with him.
Marcus Gabriel is presently spending a month at the Stanford Humanities Center.
He is a professor at the University of Bonne in Germany,
where he holds the chair for epistemology and modern and contemporary philosophy.
He is also director of the International Center for Philosophy in Bonne,
and at the age of 42, he has a list of publications as long as the Rhine River.
We'll be posting his bio on our website,
but meanwhile, I'll mention just a few of his books
that have appeared in English translation.
Transcendental Ontology, essays and German Idealism,
Continuum 2011.
Why the world does not exist,
polity pressed 2017.
I am not a brain, philosophy of mind for the 21st century,
polity 2019.
The limits of epistemology, polity 2020,
the power of art, polity 2020,
and the book we're going to be discussing with him today the meaning of thought,
polity pressed 2021.
Marcus Gabriel, welcome to the program.
It's a pleasure to have you with us on entitled opinions today.
Thank you. It's a pleasure and honor to be here.
So you have an expansive and in-depth airy addition.
You range very broadly across many different domains and disciplines,
and I feel like I could discuss almost any topic in the history of philosophy with you.
But as I suggested in my intro, and as you yourself write in your book,
I quote you,
"We can only ever perceive some things at the expense of others."
And you call this perceptual selectionism.
So you and I have perceptually selected today,
your most recent book, The Meaning of Thought,
as the focus of our conversation.
And thought, I should mention, is a topic that I obsess a lot about on entitled opinions,
and on more than one occasion, I've invoked a statement of Heidegger,
made in 1973, where Heidegger says,
"The growing and unacknowledged anxiety in the face of thinking no longer allows insight
into the oblivion of being which determines the age."
Now, I'm not going to ask you what you make of that statement,
since that would probably take us too far astray.
But let me ask you instead about the English title of your new book, The Meaning of Thought.
Are you happy with that title, or do you find it a little bit misleading?
Because having read the book, I have a feeling that the word meaning might not be exactly what you have in mind.
Am I right about that?
Oh, absolutely.
I mean, this was a difficult choice.
The German title of the book is their zinn distinct.
So the literal, more literal translation would be the sense of thinking, which the sense.
The sense.
And so in German, I hardly ever use the equivalent, whatever that would be, for meaning,
but this would rather be the doitot.
But I hardly ever use that term, because there's a technical philosophical meaning associated with the term sense and what I do.
So the title is slightly misleading, but from a PR perspective, it sounds alright in English, but it does distort the major thesis of the book and the orientation of my thinking.
Yes, because obviously I can imagine from a marketing point of view, the meaning of thought publishers will say that will sell a lot more books.
It's the sense of thought, because a sense in English is ambiguous, but it's an important distinction because you claim that thinking is not merely a mental abstract activity.
It's actually a sense.
It's another sense in addition to the five or many more senses that we have.
Can you say something about what you mean by thinking as a sense modality if that's putting it?
That's putting it absolutely correctly.
So the basic idea is this.
For thousands of years, we have been following in many ways, including in contemporary cognitive science where people draw a perception, cognition, distinction, and so forth.
So the path laid out by Plato and Aristotle, who both argued that we had five senses, Aristotle gave spurious reasons for this horrible reasons.
Aristotle's argument is there are five elements, right?
There are better B-5 senses.
It's not much better what he says about the soul.
So they thought we had five senses and that thinking could not really be a sense, even though both entertain that possibility.
So here's what I mean now positively by it.
So the reason why people have been thinking that thought is not a sense is something like this.
So the senses have their specific objects.
Vision, you can see corners and figures and you can hear sounds and you can smell smells and so forth.
So these are the proper objects of these sense modalities.
And the idea was to define the sense modalities in terms of what they relate to.
Now thinking is particular because thinking is what Aristotle calls synthesis, Aristotle's word for this, which can put the other senses into a connection, right?
I can understand easily that I can see the source of sound, of your voice, I can see you, right?
So what thinking does, it combines the other senses and now the Greek non sequitur, therefore it's not a sense, right?
But that doesn't follow, of course, why would thinking not be a sense of other senses, right?
This is where I started, this is the point of departure of the reflection.
Now if thinking or thought is a sense, then we can accept, fully accept an idea that played to an Aristotle entertain,
namely the idea of what later become called the common sense, right?
So the English word common sense derives from Aristotle, their two passages in hiservour, where he entertains that possibility
of what they call the "coneis" and so Aristotle also thought, you know, like maybe thinking is another sense modality,
but they couldn't really make sense of this because what would the proper objects be of thinking?
And then modernity gives us the answer, right?
The proper objects of thinking are thoughts and this is where I start, but it does mean that both thoughts are real.
So in the fullest possible sense of the word real and thinking has to stand in a causal relation with thoughts,
and that's something that sounds odd to us, right?
But that's only a metaphysical baggage from Plato and Aristotle, and therefore, you know, nothing that we need to accept as obvious.
Let me ask about perception because you also discuss the difference traditionally speaking between perception and thinking,
but you're also committed to the idea that perception thought is a form of perception.
And in fact, it might even be a subgenre of perception.
Yes.
And this, of course, makes us think about marital pointy and certain traditions and phenomenology.
And can we have a perception that doesn't necessarily have an object in the real material world,
but which is a form of attunement to either the environment or the external world or our own bodies, as it were, no?
I find that nature does most of my thinking for me. When I go into a natural environment, and all of a sudden, my thought has come alive,
it's almost as if it's in communication with the environment and therefore it's coming from elsewhere, not inside the mental circuits of my brain or something like that.
Yes, we can think, one of the consequences of the view that thinking is a form of perception is that we should maybe think of our organism, maybe the brain, but that's a complicated issue with the brain or a subset of the nervous system is the candidate for this.
But if the brain is as important as we currently believe somehow, then at most I think of it as a receiver.
So there are two ways, at least, of our ways of thinking about the brain here. One is the brain produces presence.
It produces images of the environment, controlled hallucinations as neuroscientists, and also as recently called this.
That's one view. Sounds are not really there, they're not out there. People are also not out there in colors aren't out there. They are somehow in the brain.
So that's one picture, which I think is entirely incoherent. It's one of the worst ideas anyone has ever had, pushing reality into our skull where you find the brain, but clearly you don't find people in colors.
They already see there's a problem. The other option is to think of the brain as a receiver, pretty much like whatever TV set. A TV set receives the game show, but doesn't produce the game show.
So we should rather think of our organism in general as a receiver for reality, not as a producer, a sampler of presence, not a producer as philosopher, Mark Johnson puts it here in America.
That's a consequence of that idea. There's a sense in which there's nothing relevant that we produce and thinking. Thinking is much more of a passive organ than we sometimes believe when we call it in the Kantian tradition spontaneous and self-o.
Exactly. It has this receptivity. We actually did a show on Schrodinger years back. He has this beautiful little book essay, "Long As a Mind and Matter," where he says that the scientific view of the world is all related to the object.
And if you look from the scientific physical point of view, sensations are nothing. They don't know any taste. They don't know any color. They don't know any sounds. What they know are vibrations.
And therefore, what science in its objectivity is required to do is take out the subject for which these physical, biological, chemical processes appear.
And what you're saying is that that subject is, in fact, a sentient, receptive subject that is in direct contact with reality. In fact, you insist also on the word contact, which I like a lot, because it means we are in a kind of touching relation. Even if it's not just the sense of touch. Aristotle, by the way, he thought that touch was the primary sense, because when we hear, when we look, when we taste, we're actually touching things.
And I think when we think we are also in touch with something, I don't know.
I mean, look, Aristotle has this nice line in metaphysics, in his metaphysics, where he says thinking is a form of touching, touching, tea game, tea.
And so this is why, you know, concept, you know, from the Latin, is also, you know, it's grasping the metaphor there if metaphor it is, right? It's probably not even a metaphor, right? It's tactile.
And so that's something I think that thinking is one way of being in touch with reality. But here, and, you know, I hasn't to add, reality must not be reduced to physical reality.
I think of the universe in all its vastness, right, the physical universe, as an ontological province. The universe, compared to what there is, is infinitely small in size, regardless how big it turns out to be.
Because, you know, look, for instance, there are more real numbers than entities in the noble universe. And there you already see that numbers overflow, right, by far, by trans-finite,
it amounts, as a matter of fact, the size of the universe. And that's just the, that's just the physical... Because it's infinite. It's more than infinite, right?
There are more than infinitely many numbers. And the universe, as we know it, is finite, right? It's fought in billion light years in every direction from within it. So it's probably finite. And even if it were infinite, there would still be more numbers than entities in the universe.
This is just a consequence of trans-finite set theory. But even if we bracket that, right, I mean, so now we have physical entities and numbers. But there are many, many other objects. So either I think, for instance, that Stanford University is not in the universe.
Only a part of Stanford University is in the universe. Name me that part of the building infrastructure and the cryptocurrency owned by Stanford and so forth, and the president's body, right?
These entities are measurable, have a measurable side. But the legal status of Stanford University or the meaning conveyed in a radio show on its campus are not within the reach of physics. And so you see that even, you know, like, I would claim that the idea that Stanford is in the universe is actually a category mistake. Only a part of Stanford is.
How does that conjugate with the whole concept of new realism of which you are the main proponent and champion, and how do you understand realism from this point of view and what relation thought has to the real?
So fundamentally, right, what's a sense modality? One way of thinking about a sense modality, hearing, feeling, touching, you know, the sense of equilibrium and no-seal-ception, right, when you feel that something wrong with your body, pain and all of that, right?
So these are the sense modalities. What's happened? What is a sense modality? And my answer is it's a fallible way of being in touch with a reality.
And in general, I think of reality as that about which we can have true or false beliefs, which is why, you know, there's this good old intuition that you are realist if you think that reality can correct you, right?
So if you think of yourself as fallible in a profound way. And now let's extend that idea to thinking.
And then clearly, even pure thinking, logical, mathematical thinking is fallible. No one knows everything about the trigonometric functions, because mathematics is nowhere near its end, right?
We haven't fully explored the mathematical part of reality, right? And we know that. We know from meta-mathematics that we don't know everything in mathematics.
So even there, we are fallible. So fallibility is crucial for the kind of realism that I'm pushing. So the claim that we can know things as they really are. For instance, that I'm really in Stanford right now, that there is no veil separating me from Stanford, linguistic veil, mental veil, brainy, veil and so forth.
That realist claim is fully compatible with the idea that we get things wrong too. So traditionally, if we say realism, it sounds like a naivety, right? I mean, how can you be a realist?
We construct worlds and we select in perception. But the new realism is a second order view. So it's a view which confirms the fact that we entouch with reality without thereby collapsing into
a dot-matism, according to which knowing reality is kind of simple. It can be incredibly hard.
So how do things stand with facts? And if the new realism is committed to the proposition that there are ideas that can be falsified or theories or...
Then is it not actually quite sympathetic to a scientific worldview that determines the matters of fact, according to criteria of verifiability and falsifiability?
And I know that you're certainly by no means anti-scientific, but you do have a certain skepticism about using the scientific technological paradigm as your guiding measure for determining what is real and what is not real and what is true and what is not true.
Yeah, so the scientific paradigm, right, what's often just called the scientific method, though I think this is a misleading term, but let's speak as if we knew what that was, right, the scientific method, right?
Something like measurement and math. And indeed verifiability, falsifiability, etc. Right? Being in touch with a physical universe, primarily. That's what's going on if we call it the scientific method.
You know, like the scientific method is grounded already in a form of objectivity, it can have grasp. So avian Schrodinger has to read his instruments, right? But reading his instruments or writing an equation on a piece of paper requires perception.
So the subjective point of view, which cannot be reduced to the physicist's language, is the ground for physical knowledge. And this is only where it begins because avian Schrodinger, right, is part of human history, of societies and so forth, of practices of sense-making, which can only be understood from the standpoint of the humanities and social sciences, or just everyday knowing.
So I think that, fundamentally, what's wrong with the scientific worldview is that it's a worldview that is a massive reduction of the hyper complexity of reality to just one layer of whatever is measurable in physical terms.
It's true, but with complexity as you yourself argue that the complexity of reality is infinite, and we cannot circumscribe even a tiny portion of it. Therefore perceptual selection is there for the fact that we only have a little spot where we touch reality. That would seem to, well, open up the question of how broadly,
do you want to bring other things into the realm of the real? And what's interesting, one of the things that's very interesting about your book to me is that you talk about immaterial reality.
And the notion that immaterial reality can also be, we can have true ideas and false ideas about immaterial reality.
How do you understand immaterial reality?
So for instance, think of mathematics or art for that matter. So you read a novel, say, and no novel of whatever form, whatever genre, whatever part of history, contains all the information about its fictional objects for you to know everything about them, that you would have to know outside of a fictional context.
Just take what's false hair color. So the text of the play doesn't tell you, or what's an Akarinina's favorite song. So you probably won't be able to figure that out from the novel.
So these gaps there, but you're allowed to fill them out in interpretation. And now take another case, mathematics, where you're clearly dealing with immaterial objects, such as coordinate systems or points.
There aren't any points in physical reality, but without the idea that there are points in mathematical space, you cannot even begin to understand physical reality.
So you need all those immaterial objects, lines and points and functions and operations, and so forth and imaginations in order to be in touch with these kinds of objects.
So here's another, it's the same question from another point of view. You begin your book, I think, with a sentence that the human being is the animal that does not want to be an animal, that we have a different self-portrait of, we want to see ourselves as at least not reducible to our organic novel being.
So first question, do you believe in what the tradition is called a soul?
Well, that is really an important question. So I think what the tradition, if we look at really high brow philosophical thinking about this Plato and the Neoplatonists say, then, yeah, I think what they call the soul, yes, I think we do have that.
But at this point, we ought to remember that there were serious discussions about whether the mortal soul, what's its relationship to the body, right? And if it's even immortal, it's not so obvious.
Nowadays, when we say the soul, it immediately sounds like ridiculous creationists superstition, but demanding concept of the soul, which is the classical concept.
According to that concept, I think I'd happily say that we have a soul. Another question related is, do you not believe in mystery, but do you take mystery to be something that is more than just the unknown?
Namely that it's something that can provoke thinking, but we're thinking we'll not be able to eventually circumscribe and exhaust it.
That's, well, the answer to this, I think, will be, I'm thinking about this very hard right now, that indeed there is mystery, right?
The mystery is not just an illusion, an epistemic illusion on the side of the Noah. So one story is something like this associated with a scientific worldview again, right?
Reality is in principle accessible to physics, just that we're not at the end of inquiry, and this is why reality looks like a mysterious, wonderful place to us, which is a kind of mistake on the side of the kinds of animals that we are.
One very widespread story, but then all the mysteries of our life, you know, falling in love or meeting new friends or just any kind of deeper experience, drop out of the picture of reality.
And that I think must be a mistake, because I take the human standpoint seriously. I don't replace the human standpoint by something that's not human.
So yeah, I try to overcome the human desire, not to be human. That's one of my projects. And that then means indeed taking mystery, the uncanny and all the famous phenomena, analyzed by, you know, first wave phenomenologists, Hidegger, Sartre and so forth, right?
That means requiring that part of philosophical thinking, you know, taking this really seriously too.
I'd like to ask about artificial intelligence in this context, you devote a lot of time to discussing artificial intelligence within your meditation on science, technology, and its industrial applications.
And if I get you right, you think there's a great deal of misunderstanding that surrounds artificial intelligence that's beginning with the idea that it is intelligent, no?
Yes. Or the other side of that is whoever said that our human thinking is not artificial, right? Yeah.
So where do you stand on this question of the AI becoming a kind of world destiny if you want to use Igalian term for our 21st century and beyond?
Well, so, well, let's first draw distinction between the research field of AI, which has many components, machine learning, deep learning neural networks, whatever neuromophic computing and whatever fancy things are happening in this part of the world here on campus right now, right?
So that's just a serious form of mathematical research. And then this research in computer science and so forth, right, can lead to applications to so called AI systems, which are produced, you know, industrial products flowing from this research.
Now, those products, let's call them AI, right, for the time being, those products in my view have zero intelligence. So alpha zero, in my view, doesn't neither play chess nor go. And so here's why. Usually AI researchers never say what they mean by intelligence. 99% dodged the question. So let me, you know, do this for them. So here's a proposal. Intelligence in the sense in which they're modeling it is to compare the data to the data.
It's the capacity of a given system to solve a problem and find out a amount of time. And so if you use an algorithm like we do, you know, I use my algorithm every morning to get coffee, right, first to this open this field water and so forth.
So it's an algorithm. So it gets me my coffee faster and another system can be more intelligent at providing me with coffee by even being faster. So we can measure that capacity, right, and then create mathematical models for it.
But you can only solve a problem if you so much as have a problem. Now animals have evolved under, you know, conditions which are such that we all have problems, life and death problems at every minute of our life.
So having a problem is the origin of intelligence. So as long as my smartphone or that search engine does not have a problem, it also won't really be solving problems. What it does is, you know, it manipulates the electromagnetic field.
So what's impressive about this technology is that it, you know, writes code and therefore manipulates, right, structures, the shape of electricity on planet Earth, for better or for worse, because it also creates sustainability issues.
But there's no thinking there. So it's this is pure, you know, stupid materiality manipulated by very intelligent people. So the whole intelligence in AI research is in the AI research. They are highly research as they are highly intelligent, but what they produce is just a bunch of stuff.
Yeah. You claim that we project our own human nature into artificial intelligence and some of our apocalyptic scenarios that it's going to develop to the point where it's going to destroy humanity, that these very current and quite widespread convictions that people have that AI is going to be the undoing of humanity.
You claim is connected to also the social and political conditions under which artificial intelligence and most of our other digital technologies have arisen, namely war, the kind of inevitability and the, the, the, this,
this Sanghunary history that we've had as a species where warfare has been a constant piece
being only momentary respects from this. This sort of aggression is built into our imagination
that the instruments of, well, products of artificial intelligence research are going
to become militant and turn against us. On the one hand, you dismiss that as projection.
On the other, you warn towards the end of your book that if we don't do a better job at
arriving at self-understanding of who we are as a species and not only as a species,
but as a human being, that is an animal that is at odds with being an animal that perhaps
these worst-case imagined scenarios may welcome true. In what way can a more rigorous and lucid
understanding save us from the worst-case scenarios?
Well, I think what we get with a more lucid self-understanding provided among other things
by the so-called humanities is insight into the current shape of the human machine interface
because this is where the action is. So the projection, while as we're being merely a projection,
is not less dangerous. The danger lies in the projection and not in the autonomous system.
The danger is Putin's use of autonomous weapons, not the autonomous weapon. If there's
a autonomous weapon lying around somewhere in Siberia, then again, that's just stuff somewhere
in Siberia. But the fact is that there's a human machine interface architecture which
cannot be studied, meaningfully, with the help of AI research in the narrow sense of
the term. So you need a different form of understanding to even see what's going on.
And then, all sorts of critical theory of AI from the feminist and so forth side has
been pointing out for a long time that the metaphors deployed to think of AI as a slave and so forth,
they're not innocent. So we need to overcome the, which is much deeper than just this bias
research. We need to overcome the wrong, that is the misconception of ourselves that's driving
our research in order to get better objects. The objects themselves are flawed.
And what exactly would be the right understanding of ourselves?
Yeah. Okay. So the right understanding is what I call higher order and for apologies. So,
you know, we have self-portraits and there are indefinitely many. We think of ourselves
in many ways as having a soul or not having a soul, right, as German or not German, in whatever
way we think about ourselves, right, identity formation, highly complex process. But here's
something that we all do in the same way when thinking about ourselves. We think about
ourselves. So let's call that human-mindedness. I use the German word guys that this point usually
as a technical term and it's the capacity to do something in light of a self-conception. Now,
that capacity is not manifold, just one capacity whose realization then differs historically
overpopulation, historically, and diagramically. But the capacity itself is just one,
it's the capacity of being human. So that's the strategy. Identifying something that is absolutely
universal in all human beings and then grounding ethics, politics, and thinking on that. I call
that higher order and for apology because I do not identify the human being with a given specific
object out then reality, neither with a soul nor with a brain nor with a biological species,
but with a capacity. In addition to the capacity, there is a perversity in human nature that
I don't think properly falls under the category of capacity. I think it falls under the category of
maybe drive, if you want to use a Freudian concept of a death drive. Let me quote passage from Kant
that you quote in your book where Kant was always perplexed, if not stunned, by this
self-destructive aspect of the human race. So he describes how due to the conflict in the natural
predispositions of the human, this human creature reduces himself and others of his own species by means
of plagues that he invents for himself, such as the oppression of domination, the barbarism of war,
etc. to such need, and he works so hard for the destruction of his own species that even if the most
beneficial nature outside of us had made the happiness of our species its end, that end would not be attained
in a system of nature upon the earth because the nature inside of us is not receptive to that.
This is profoundly almost a dippoli perverse that, and I've claimed this often on this show
that there is something in the human that militates against the idea of happiness. I've even gone so far
as a suggested. We live with an unavowed species guilt by virtue of what we have done to the rest of
the animal kingdom and this daily holocaust of other life forms so that we can continue our existence,
that perhaps it's even a form of natural justice that you yourself say that humans are the worst enemy
of the human race. We are our own worst enemies and that perhaps this is one way of that we pay off
the debt and the guilt that keeps us in our being because it's not going to be any tigers or bears
or any other kind of force of nature that's going to undo us so we have to punish ourselves.
Where does this drive to self-punishment come? Because it's not a capacity, it is a drive and
are we in control and can we master that drive? You end your book with a chapter on the human
future tragedy or comedy and if that drive wins out and history has shown that for the most part
it almost always wins out then we have a tragic outcome to look forward to. But you believe with what
you call the new enlightenment that the possibility of a comic ending not in the sense of funny
but a happy ending is possible. Yes, absolutely because I think that and this is exactly what
Kant thought, right? He's wavering in his philosophy of history between if you like optimism and
pessimism which was of course the debate at the time between Leipnerts and Schopenhauer,
right? This is where he stands historically. So he is how I think about this. We are not designed
to be happy, that's the Kantian argument there and at the beginning of groundwork of morals and
everywhere, right? That's exactly the outcome. Well, we could be happy. Yeah, nature doesn't say that
we can't be happy. Sure, but if that's not allowed ourselves to be happy. Exactly. And Kant's things
that this creates the opportunity for ethics because ethics is about the discipline
both intellectually and then as a practice that helps you to do something that you might not even
want to do. So the moral art, that's the basic Kantian idea, the moral art is something that is not
there in order to make you happy. So morality for Kant himself, right? Interestingly, is death
drive. So this is something that later of course Lacombrod out in his famous text about Kant with
Sade, right? Kant of Exhade and that's the argument there. Now, but I'm more optimistic even than
Kant because the new enlightenment is based on the idea that there are moral facts. So part of the
immaterial realities, right? Or as he and Stanford, Frank Fukuyaman is most recent book called it
"The Intangible Goods." So if they're intangible goods, then maybe ethics is about a way of dealing with
intangible goods. And if we bring this into the picture, right, then we all too, of course,
restructure of our economies and so forth. So the new enlightenment is a very demanding project.
I do predict that sooner or later the new enlightenment will become reality, but this might be after
nuclear fallout in 2025. You're referring us back now to Europe and the events that are taking place
in Europe. And I know that with your center that you have in bone, that you are directly involved in
the political counseling of bringing moral facts, ethical facts to bear on certain decisions in
the political sphere. And you have this little section called the end of the book "A
Pethos-Laiden Final Remark" in which you turn your attention really to Europe. And what
is there an essence to Europe? Is there a civilizational identity to the European which you reject?
And you do that in order to provoke what you call an unconditional universalism. So you are
committed to universalism, to a new enlightenment, and yet you say that Europe is not Christian,
Europe is not, doesn't have an essence. And yet for me there's absolutely nothing more European
in its matrix than what you're proposing, namely a new enlightenment and an unconditional
universalism of moral facts. Where in the history of, you know, and prehistory and where other
than Christian Europe does such a notion of unconditional universalism arise. So that's the one part,
I was with you, every step of the way, I really love everything that you're arguing for,
but I just did not find it particularly convincing that your thought is not profoundly rooted in a
distinctly European Christian kind of tradition.
Well, I think that arguably, as for instance, recently to just counterbalance that a little bit,
so doubting young contemporary Chinese philosopher wrote a nice book, Tien Xia, everything under
one heaven, it's a Chinese concept, which he argues goes back as far back as the Joe Dynasty. So
long before meaning, that could be such a thing as European universalism. And he points out that
unconditional universalism and moral facts and so forth can be found in the Chinese tradition long before
there's such a thing as Europe. And other people have, including Plato himself, have thought that Egypt
is the birthplace of the idea. And now recent African philosophers tend to tell me, no,
like within Ubuntu is just one manifestation. In other African traditions, we have these ideas in
oral traditions also long before. So there's a point to be made that unconditional universalism
enters what will later become Europe via Africa through Egypt. So I think that if anything Europe,
what you characterize is in a certain sense, African, there's an interesting story to be told about
via Egypt and so forth. So I would, if you like, I would dismantle that idea. I think Christianity,
let me start there. I think Christianity is not universalist in its direction. There's usually this
reconstruction where Paul is a universalist and so forth, right, as opposed to the ancient testament.
I was thinking more about the notion of the every soul being equal before God and that there's
this unconditional absolute value of every person. And therefore the idea of dignity that we
deserve to live with dignity that we recognize that a moral universalism would
would amount essentially, and I think you argue this would amount to a system, political social
system that would recognize the intrinsic dignity of every human being. Absolutely.
Yeah. And so I think that that story, right, there's clearly, there's a reading of this where
this plays an important role in Christianity. But I think that we can tell stories where similar things
could be said about other religions and clearly also non-religious thought. So I think the idea,
though associated in manyfold ways with Christianity and parts of European history,
extend well beyond. So this is, here I'm just making a historical point.
But I think that regardless of the genealogy of the view, we can detach the view to a certain
extent from its genealogy. I mean, that's a crucial maneuver for a universalist,
because anti-universalism usually argues precisely that the idea emerges in a historically
contingent fairly local context and therefore it's not as universalist as it sounds, right.
But that's why the new enlightenment, you know, that's the opening move. The new enlightenment
takes these arguments from the Gian and so forth tradition into account in order to then overcome them.
So it's moral realism and moral facts despite Nietzsche.
Right. Right. Well, all that's very interesting. So I'm just, because we wind down the last sentence
of your book, you say it is time for a European philosophy, something that has previously existed,
just as little as a truly unified Europe. What do you mean that it's time for a European philosophy?
Is that just a provocation or?
It is a provocation also in this particular context, right, in which I'm, you know, like wrote the
book and so forth, and that we're talking about this now in America and so forth. But I think indeed,
there's something valuable, right, about what we associate with Europe when we call it Europe and
so forth, right, with all the complexities. And I think that it's been harmful for us in modernity,
globally harmful, that we went into this, you know, like mode where we think of Europe as just like
whatever a bunch of colonial oppressors, right, and so forth. So these, these worries about Europe,
part of what I'm doing is I, you know, I want to dispel that. I think this, this has led to a lot
of nonsense, this critique of Europe and Eurocentrism and so forth, right. So I don't think that Eurocentrism
in the way in which it's, you know, attacked has ever existed in my life. So, but I hear these critiques
and blah, blah, blah. So I think that's something that we need to overcome with a much more subtle
understanding of Europe, including, right, all the obvious post-colonial observations. But this
has always been obvious to me. I never thought Europe was Christian, right? Of course there was a Muslim,
you know, invasion without which we wouldn't have the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. This has
all been obvious to me, Math is, you know, algorithm and so forth, these are Arab inventions. So I
am, you know, and Jews have been around and atheists. I never had this course. But you can't deny that
that Christianity has been the dominant cultural foundation of the geographical area, the
Skaldura. And when Nietzsche's madman goes into the marketplace to declare that God is dead
and that we have killed him, he's referring to a specifically Christian God that had served as the
foundation of Western history for two millennia. And again, if I take that Christian God out of
the picture, I don't understand anything about the Middle Ages. I don't understand anything
about the Renaissance. I don't understand its art. I don't understand its politics. I don't understand
its rituals and its societies. That's what Nietzsche meant, that what died was the foundation
of a certain culture that was, you can say that that Christianity was extremely more diverse
and complex and heterogeneous than one might imagine. It's not just the Middle Shore, like the
American Evangelical Christian that it's all about Jesus saving me. No. But it, you know, I don't
think one can just allow it to dissolve into all these differentiations.
Definitely. But there's an interesting technology for the Christian foundations of Europe.
No, that's fine to understand historically how, of course, to what degree that Christianity can be called
a historical foundation for a certain culture. Yes. But what's interesting about this, of course,
if we go, you know, slightly at the origin, of course, then of what will become the European
Middle Ages, you have, of course, in a very important moment of fusion of paganism and
Bible and the various cults. So, you know, I wrote my dissertation about Céline's philosophy of mythology.
And at that time, I look very much into the history of the Ulu-Cinian mysteries and all these cults.
Right. So, Christianity is, as a practice, the Roman Catholic Church and so forth, right, emerges
from an entirely... Oh, absolutely.
Oh, absolutely.
Actually, right. That was genius of the church is adding incorporated rather than repudiated
all these legacies. Yes. Pagan and Jewish and host of others.
Yeah.
But it was an institution.
Yes, absolutely. And that institution, right, it's perfectly right to think of that institution
indeed as Christianity. And that has been the dominating software of Europe. And I would argue
more so the United States of America, right? It's Protestantism.
I often say, as always, one of the bad German ideas, I'm with you.
Yeah. And America also has strangely enough, you know, it doesn't have Christian foundations.
But when you take the founding of the American Republic in something like the separation of
church and state, you say, well, it's kind of weird, isn't separation of church and state exactly what
Christ tells to Pontius Pilax, you know, render unto Caesar, what is Caesar's and unto God, what is
the separation of church and state is an idea that begins there.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah. I couldn't agree more.
Yeah, I think of America, even contemporary America, strikes me as more Christian than contemporary
Europe. Yes. No doubt about that. And especially where there's no suspicion that Christianity
isn't work at all. This demand that so many of our American contemporaries have that they have to
be on the side of the, that they are the good, they are, you know, it's good against evil.
And it's social justice. It's this and that and the other, it's really, it has this moral imperative
that is really quite hard to imagine it having some other source than this demand that you have
to be on the side of the good.
Absolutely. And here you see the new enlightenment that I propose is not about this moral righteousness,
it's not a form of moralism. It tells us that it's very hard to figure out the moral facts.
So if you are an unconditional universalist like me, right, you look at the conflict that we see
now, you know, the Ukrainian conflict in a completely different way because you have to be also
able and that's a hard thing to say right now, right? But we ought to recognize the humanity in our
Russian friends. Absolutely. I mean, if the Russian people is a, I mean, I feel for them. Yeah,
of course, that's an important element, right? In just the same way in which we are defending and
also defend the freedom of our Ukrainian friends, right? We have to see the humanity because if we
think now that there's like a good side of this conflict and then just the evil dictator and so
so forth, that narrative, right, misconstruced effects. And so, you know, the new enlightenment is a
hard project. It's very much opposed to the moralistic climate of the contemporary public sphere.
Well, and as I mentioned in the previous show that I still cannot understand how
certain individual psychopaths, single individuals can determine the destiny of millions and
millions of people. And it's Putin is just the most recent incarnation. But, you know, we have
our history is a long story of single psychopaths just taking control of entire societies.
Anyway, we're not going to go down that road, Marcus, because we want to keep our discussion,
which is come to an end to, you know, in the realm of ideas and the idea of thought and how much
thinking we have left to do about all these very fundamental issues and you do a splendid job of that
in this book and your others, which I'm looking forward to reading. And the ones that you're going
to write, I know that you're working on a book on nonsense, for example, and a book on being wrong.
So, thanks for coming on to entitled opinions. And I want to remind our listeners who are
speaking with Marcus Gabriel from the University of Bonne, a philosopher, and now a friend of entitled
opinions. So, come back and see us again. With pleasure, thanks Robert. Take care. Take care.
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