Living Wisdom with Patrick Lee Miller

Plato and Bumble, Lucretius and OK Cupid. Cait Lamberton, a professor of marketing, discusses how we “sell” ourselves on the dating “market." Should we be ourselves, or must we trade in appearances? What counts as success in love anyway?

Sex and love are meaningful: done well, they orient our soul towards eternal Beauty. So says Plato. This episode of the podcast aims to explain his theory and then show how it incorporates what is best in the others already discussed (Aristophanes, Lucretius, and Freud).   Recommended Readings: Plato, Symposium 201d - 212c   https://www.amazon.com/Plato-Symposium-Hackett-Classics/dp/0872200760

“A man who will kiss a girl’s lips passionately,” wrote Freud, “may perhaps be disgusted at the idea of using her toothbrush.” This episode explains why. Recommended Readings: Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality https://amzn.to/31C4lAL

Are sex and love meaningful? For Aristophanes, finding and joining with your soul-mate is the key to happiness. Lucretius disagrees. Sexual desire is simply an agitation of the body’s elements; love is the dangerous fantasy that there is any greater meaning to it than that. Recommended Readings: Aristophanes: Plato’s Symposium (189d - 194e) https://amzn.to/2Yx3mjw Lucretius: On the Nature of Things 4.10301287 https://amzn.to/3810jDy

Be Right Back is a story of love,  grief … and artificial intelligence. After Martha loses her husband, Ash, she begins the difficult process of mourning. That is, until she is interrupted by the arrival of an artificial “Ash”. Martha’s love is renewed, but she soon grows disenchanted, even angry. Why? Is it because the robot is an imperfect imitation of her husband (culled from his electronic traces)? Is it because the robot is too submissive? Or is it, finally, because it’s a robot -- determined rather than free? Simon DeDeo and Patrick Lee Miller discuss and debate the possibilities, ranging widely, but touching especially on the paradoxes of love and self-reflection. Guest: Simon DeDeo (@SimonDeDeo) https://www.cmu.edu/dietrich/sds/people/faculty/simon-dedeo.html

Sartre argues that love is paradoxical: the lover craves love that is given freely, but because such love can be revoked, and this possibility makes him anxious, the lover also wishes to control the beloved. He wants love that is free yet determined. This episode shows how this paradox stems from Hegel’s Master-Slave dialectic, then concludes by synthesizing it with the theories of preceding episodes (on Ovid, Solomon, and Freud) in order to argue that loving wisdom requires liberating the slave within.  Recommended Readings: Sartre, Being and Nothingness (3.3.1: “First Attitude Toward Others: Love, Language, Masochism”)

Nowadays we call it depression, but Freud was right to notice its similarities to mourning. The mourner grieves someone or something she recognizes she's lost. The melancholic lives as if what she's lost is in some ways still present. The depressed are haunted. Recommended Readings: Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia” https://www.amazon.com/Freud-Reader-Sigmund/dp/0393314030  

The Roman poet Ovid tells the story of Pygmalion, a misogynist who made a statue of his ideal woman and loved it rather than anyone with flesh and blood. But was this love or grief? Robert Solomon, an American Existentialist, gives us one theory to answer that question.  Recommended Readings:  Solomon, The Passions  https://amzn.to/2MaXhSJ Ovid, Metamorphoses https://amzn.to/3gqASix

The Arkangel device permits parents to filter and monitor the experiences of their children, to the point that they neither see nor hear anything that might cause emotional distress. But who is being protected? Whose interests does this device really serve: vulnerable children, or anxious parents? In this wide-ranging conversation, two philosopher-dads discuss the difficulties of parenting -- some of them perennial, others particular to a society so preoccupied with safety that it threatens to inhibit children’s growth

“Trauma” is Greek for “wound.” The world can wound our souls as well as our bodies, and some victims of psychological trauma never recover their equilibrium. Freud recognizes that we are vulnerable in this way (“vulnus” is Latin for “wound”), and has a theory of what happens. The Stoic Marcus Aurelius, by contrast, thinks we preserve an “inner citadel,” a part of our soul that is invulnerable. The founder of CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) drew from Stoicism to develop a clinical method that promised to help people recover control of their minds. Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff adapt this Stoic approach to address recent movements in American higher-ed that would reformulate education for traumatized students.

Playtest is the tragedy of happy-go-lucky Cooper, who travels the world to escape the pain of his family, where his father has died of Alzheimers. The real adventure comes at the end of his trip, when to make money for his return home he volunteers to test a new, virtual horror game. By probing his brain, this game anticipates his fears and subjects him to them one by one. But what is his deepest fear? It isn’t spiders or his high-school bully, as it turns out, but instead the annihilation of himself. That was the fate not only of his father, but also of Greek tragic heroes, such as Sophocles’ Oedipus. Tragedy is the highest cultural form, according to Nietzsche, because this is also our inevitable fate. In this conversation we discuss horror, tragedy, Nietzsche, and the peculiar genre of this episode.   Guest: Christopher Mountenay

How should we live with our suffering? Can we save ourselves from it through knowing? Are we doomed to self-deception? Or can we save ourselves through illusion and fantasy -- whether on the public stage or in the private theater of our mind? Nietzsche and Freud offer parallel answers to these questions, both drawing on the tragic story of a clever king, Oedipus, who could investigate and understand everything but himself. Recommended Readings: Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy https://www.amazon.com/Nietzsche-Tragedy-Writings-Cambridge-Philosophy/dp/0521639875 Freud’s On Dreams https://www.amazon.com/By-Sigmund-Freud-On-Dreams/dp/B00N4G1B5U

 Fifteen Million Merits presents a dystopia where most people ride stationary bicycles to generate its electricity. Although not exactly enslaved, they are motivated to keep riding by the merits they earn for their mileage -- which can be used to buy only necessities and baubles -- and the prospect of being demoted to custodial work if they stop. Most are alienated from their work, distracted only by meaningless entertainment that ranges from the cruel to the pornographic. Into this allegory of capitalism enter Bing and Abby, who test whether beauty and love provide enough reality and meaning to escape. In this conversation, we use Aristotle, Hegel, and Marx -- but especially Hegel -- to understand their situation.

Aristotle argues that there are natural slaves, people who are suited by nature to be commanded by other men. Their natural masters can live virtuous lives, consummated by philosophical contemplation, while slaves work to produce the necessary goods. Hegel believes that masters and slaves are made not by nature but by history’s struggle for recognition and status, which every human being craves. Marx adopts Hegel’s reasoning to argue that in an era of industrial capitalism laborers are tantamount to slaves: alienated from their work, each other, and their very selves. All three theories turn on a crucial distinction in Aristotle between three types of human doing.  Recommended Readings:  Aristotle: Metaphysics, 1048b20-35; Nicomachean Ethics 10.4, 1174a13-b7 https://amzn.to/34fYFvK Hegel: Phenomenology of Spirit, B.IV.A “Independence and Dependence of Self-Consciousness: Lordship and Bondage” (pp. 111-19) https://amzn.to/3c0KFc3 Marx: Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, “Estranged Labor” pp. 70-81); Capital, Volume 1.1.1.4, “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof”  (pp. 319-29) https://amzn.to/2VaNEaL    

Nosedive exaggerates our obsession with social media. It shows how a whole society might be led to seek social status above all. By smiling, conforming, and betraying her better judgment, its main character seeks only to improve her social score. Two people try to liberate her from this enslavement to social status, but in the end she is freed from it only after she loses it -- and everything else she thought she wanted. Amanda Lowe getintotherapy.com/aboutme Karin Arndt drkarinarndt.com/  

Plato’s political theory is about the “constitutions” of societies. But a constitution (politeia in Greek) is how something is organized, and he also notices that there are parallels between how societies and souls are constituted. For example, societies organized around status (as if status were the best thing in life) tend to be populated by people who love status above all. So too for money. Education is the link. Societies reproduce themselves by educating people in their image.   Recommended Readings: Plato, Republic 8, 543a1 - 555b1 https://amzn.to/2TVdL4W  

Psych-ology is a Greek word meaning account (logos) of the soul (psyche). In this sense, the “soul” is whatever moves us by desire. But Plato observes that we are moved, sometimes in opposite directions, by three different sorts of desire: for wisdom, for status, and for money. There are basically three types of people according to which of these desires is strongest in the soul: wisdom-lovers (philo-sophers), status-lovers, and money-lovers.  Recommended Readings: Plato’s Republic (Book 4, 436b7 - 441c2; Book 9, 588b9 - e2) https://amzn.to/2TVdL4W  

Bandersnatch allows the viewer to make choices for the main character. It is therefore as much a game as it is a standard story. What is the difference? In standard stories, the character is determined to act as the writer has scripted him. In a game we are free to determine alternative actions for him. He is thus still determined, by us. We viewers feel free. But are we, really? Do we want to be?  Guest: Stuart Candy https://design.cmu.edu/user/1459

Are we free? Do we want to be? Gorgias argues that our actions are out of our control: we are susceptible to fate, or the gods, or physical force, or the seductive words of clever speakers -- such as himself. Dostoevsky, or rather one of his characters, tells a story arguing that for humans freedom is burdensome, so that anyone who sought to liberate us would in fact be harming us.   Recommended Readings: Gorgias’s Encomium of Helen: https://fla.st/2Ifp4j9 Dostoevsky’s “Grand Inquisitor” from The Brothers Karamazov http://bit.ly/38hY5xV

The idea of God is the invention of a clever politician who saw that people are more thoroughly controlled by manipulation of their minds than they are by force upon their bodies. Foucault applies this insight (from Critias, but also Plato) to modern society. Recommended Readings: Critias fragment: http://bit.ly/31y2YRT Foucault, “Panopticism,” Discipline and Punish (3.3): http://bit.ly/38aRuX0 https://amzn.to/31A5eI9

Plato tells a strange story about strange people -- who are like us. This allegory is the most important reading of this podcast, and indeed of all philosophy. This episode recounts it, providing a line-by-line commentary.   Recommended Readings: Plato’s Republic Book 7 (514a - 521b): http://bit.ly/2SaFCyJ https://amzn.to/3bjpd2j  

Welcome to the Living Wisdom Podcast. This podcast discusses how we might live with wisdom nowadays, and how the wisdom of past philosophers (even from antiquity) is still very much alive. The first season is organized around the Netflix series Black Mirror. Philosophers will help us understand the show, and the show will help us understand their ideas.