The Philosophy Iceberg Explained

0:01 welcome to the philosophy iceberg if you're not already familiar with the iceberg memes it's basically a way of organizing topics related to a subject from the most popular to the most obscure towards the start of the iceberg you'll find a lot of philosophical ideas that you might encounter in an introductory course on philosophy and towards the bottom of the iceberg you'll find more obscure and complicated concepts which get increasingly weird and spicy the further down you go yeah boy ensure i know that other people have made philosophy icebergs before but nothing quite like this one another one i found was by infinity sun on youtube who focused more on individual philosophers the iceberg meme i'm using is from the reddit user

0:46 deadspark and it focuses more on specific concepts rather than philosophers themselves which i think will be an interesting angle as you can probably tell from the length of this video this is a long one so sit back get comfy maybe grab some snacks or a cup of coffee or tea and strap in [Music] rationalism and empiricism so rationalism is the view that reason is the main source and test of knowledge determining truth is not understood as a sensory process but an intellectual and deductive process and some important rationalist figures include descartes spinoza and leibniz and traditionally rationalism was contrasted with

1:32 empiricism which holds that knowledge comes primarily from sensory experience some important empiricist figures include francis bacon john locke and david hume solipsism so solipsism is the idea that only one's mind is sure to exist and that the external world or other minds cannot be known and might not even exist in the first place i made a video talking a bit about this and how it relates to the dead internet theory and the npc meme if you're interested in that basing politics off of fiction so i'm not totally sure what this one refers to but my best guess is that it's how often people call any possible set of regulations or government action as literally 1984 referencing the novel by

2:18 george orwell democracy is good this one is pretty self-explanatory a political system where the public decides who governs is good simulation theory so this is the idea that everything we perceive as the external world is actually a matrix-like simulation being run at some higher level of reality and none of this is actually real i made a video criticizing this position in the past and chances are that's how you found my channel since it's my most popular video politics is between liberalism and conservatism so from what i could tell this is basically the idea that political beliefs exist on a spectrum between left and right which leaves out the classic second axis in the political compass of

3:05 authoritarianism versus libertarianism knowledge is a true justified belief so justified true belief was a popular theory of knowledge during the enlightenment and it basically states that in order to know that some proposition is true you must not only believe it but you must also have justification in believing it and there's a famous objection to this view of knowledge which will appear in a later layer science makes philosophy redundant so the philosopher daniel dennett has a pretty good quote arguing against this there is no such thing as philosophy-free science there is only science whose philosophical baggage is taken on board without examination free speech is good this one is also self-explanatory

3:50 when you can say what you want without being penalized society good nihilism so nihilism is a family of perspectives in philosophy that reject things like objective truth morality values or meaning support for human rights another self-explanatory one there's going to be a lot of these in these early layers human rights are good because humans don't deserve to be mistreated direct realism and indirect realism so these are two opposing perspectives about the nature of conscious experience indirect or representative realism is the idea that our conscious experience is not the real world itself but an internal representation or a miniature

4:35 kind of virtual replica of the world this virtual replica system can fall into the homuncular fallacy which causes an infinite regress if some agent in our mind is interpreting these representations then how is that agent interpreting it does it also have a smaller agent inside its mind interpreting those and so on on the other side of things there's naive realism or direct realism which is the idea that our senses provide us with direct awareness of objects as they really are so these aren't representations of the external world but they actually are objects in the external world modern stoicism so this is referring to the recent cultural revival of stoic philosophy this isn't really surprising given how practical stoicism is compared to other

5:22 more metaphysical schools of philosophy stoicism is concerned with living a good life and being a good person which a lot of people really want to do william b irvine is probably the figure i'm most familiar with in this movement and i would definitely recommend his stuff if you want to get into contemporary stoicism and to throw in another plug here i also made a video about stoic techniques if you want to check that out as well god exists or god doesn't exist the theists say that god definitely exists 100 the atheists say that god definitely doesn't exist no shot and the agnostics say well i don't know it's impossible for humans to know the lord may or may not

6:07 be real who is to say basic idealism so the most basic form of idealism as i understand it is george barkley's idealism he argues that material objects in the external world do not exist and only exist in the realm of the mind and ideas he has a few arguments for this and here are a couple of those the veil of perception argument in response to john locke barkley points out that locke doesn't argue how secondary qualities things like color taste or smell can result from primary qualities things like size and shape berkeley asks why god would create an external world in the first place to causally generate our ideas when he

6:53 could just create our ideas directly the challenge argument try to conceive of an object that is unconceived you can't extract the thing being represented from the representation so the distinction between real objects and the representation is still nested in ideas okay so outside of barclay idealism is also often attributed to indian philosophy like the vedanta schools of thought as well as mahayana buddhism and christian neoplatonism and there are also other forms of idealism that appeared later in the western tradition too like emmanuel kant's transcendental idealism and german idealism and more recently bernardo costrop is a contemporary philosopher who aligns himself with analytical idealism

7:40 the school of life the school of life is a company that runs a youtube channel with over 7 million subscribers who often make videos about philosophy it's a very popular channel among people getting into philosophy for the first time but most people who are actually well versed in philosophy tend to criticize it for inaccurate representations of the views of various philosophers and weak philosophical arguments the youtuber big joel also made a really good video criticizing some of the more general non-philosophical self-help type of content that the school of life makes as well hume's fork so starting off level two we have hume's fork one of the most famous views in

8:27 epistemology the branch of philosophy that concerns itself with knowledge knowledge and hume argues that truth can only be true in one of two ways the first of these is relations of ideas or necessary truth and these include things like all vixens are foxes all bachelors are unmarried or things like the pythagorean theorem and the other way to achieve truth is matters of fact or contingent truth an example of this would be you are watching this video on youtube right now you can't prove matters of fact by negation or finding contradictions it must be traced back to direct experience kagito ergo sum so this is probably one of the most famous quotes in all of

9:13 philosophy and was a supposedly self-evident claim made by descartes so descartes in his meditations tried to systematically doubt everything he could to try to find the fundamental fabric of existence from which philosophy can start to build knowledge he discovers that if he is doubting in the first place there must be some entity which is doing the doubting at least a thinking thing not necessarily a material thing with a body and this is his fundamental indubitable truth premise i think therefore i am property dualism so property dualism is a position in the philosophy of mind which is as you might expect a type of duelist position property dualism holds that the universe

9:59 is composed of one kind of fundamental substance the physical kind but there are two distinct properties physical properties and mental properties and this position is contrasted with substance dualism which is the idea that physical matter and the mind or consciousness are two separate substances dualism as a whole is also a small subset of the various positions in the study of consciousness there are also physicalists who believe that only the physical world exists there are panned psychists who believe that consciousness is some kind of fundamental property of reality and idealism which i was talking about earlier and these positions also split off into loads of different subpositions if you're curious there's a great video by the philosopher matt seagal which

10:44 describes all of this in depth anti-natalism anti-natalism is the idea that having children is morally wrong the main argument for this position is the idea that procreation is essentially a non-consensual process by which you send a human being into the world which is often painful and dangerous essentially minimizing the inherent suffering in life by not having children is considered more morally important than maximizing the potential happiness that might be created and there are also arguments about the inherent harm human lives cause to non-human animals and the inherent environmental impact that humans cause throughout their lives i don't have the time to make arguments against this position here even though i really disagree with it but you can hit

11:30 that subscription button and ring the bell if you're interested because i'll probably make a video about that in the future as well determinism versus free will so this is one of the most classic debates in philosophy free will is the capacity for agents like humans to choose between different possible courses of action concepts like moral responsibility praise and guilt are all dependent on this ability to freely choose your actions this is contrasted with determinism which is the idea that all events are completely determined by previous causes a choice i make can be understood as the result of neural activity in my brain which is basically caused by my upbringing as well as my inherent characteristics and dispositions i was

12:16 born with etc etc all leading back to the creation of the universe if that's the case then moral responsibility praise and guilt don't make any sense because the actions you carry out were the result of things you can't control and any sense of agency is just an illusion some philosophers like david hume have argued that free will and determinism are actually compatible which is a view surprisingly called compatibilism absurdism the absurd is all about the conflict between human desire to find meaning and value in life and our inability to actually find these with any certainty the most famous absurdist philosopher albert camus described this in his essay the myth of sisyphus he compares the

13:02 absurdity of human life with sisyphus the figure in greek mythology who is condemned to continuously push a boulder up a mountain watch it roll down again and then do it all over again forever camus argued that we should embrace this absurd condition of our existence which is encapsulated in the final line of his essay the struggle itself is enough to fill a man's heart one must imagine sisyphus happy causation isn't empirical my best guess for this one is that it's talking about hume's analysis of causation so drawing from hume's fork which i explained at the beginning of this layer he argues that causal reasoning has a problem you can't deduce causal truth from relations of ideas because negating a causal claim does not entail a

13:50 contradiction the causal claim when i let go of this pen it will fall negates to when i let go of this pen it will not fall the second claim is obviously untrue but it's still an intelligible claim it's not false a priori you also can't get at causal truth from matters of fact because it presupposes the uniformity of nature you might say every time i let go of a pen it falls so this time when i let go of the pen it will fall just because up until this point that's always been the case that doesn't logically imply that it will always be the case it's a circular argument or in other words it begs the question why is the universe uniform well because it has been previously hume concludes that our causal predictions don't come from reason they

14:38 come from custom or habit we have some innate capacity for constructing causal beliefs which is an aspect of our psychology deontological ethics deontological ethics is the ethical theory that the morality of an action is based on a series of rules this is an opposition to consequentialists who believe the morality of an action is based on its consequences the most famous version of this is probably kant's categorical imperative act only according to that maxim which you can also will that it would become a universal law this basically means that you shouldn't do something if you wouldn't like it if everybody in the world also did it things like stealing are wrong in this view because you wouldn't want everybody to be stealing

15:23 things constantly the continental analytic split a lot of people distinguish philosophy into two main groups the first is continental philosophy which comprises things like german idealism phenomenology existentialism structuralism post-structuralism critical theory and loads of other things and the second is analytic philosophy which includes figures like fraga bertrand russell g e moore and ludwig wittgenstein along with the logical positivists analytic philosophy tends to emphasize language in clear rigorous arguments with formal logic in contrast continental philosophy tends to draw from the kantian idea that philosophical reflection is the best way to answer questions about knowledge

16:10 experience and reality rather than just empirical or logical inquiry a common criticism of this divide is that continental philosophy emerged as a concept to act as a label for the types of philosophy that the analytic philosophers just didn't like very much gatier cases so the getty case is a famous objection to the justified true belief theory of knowledge that i talked about in layer one consider a murder trial the accused person is guilty and the jury believes this but even though the accused person is guilty the evidence they used in court was entirely fabricated so even though the belief is justified and true in this case the truth is not appropriately related to the justification of the

16:55 belief existentialism existentialism is a school of philosophy that's usually associated with figures like kierkegaard dostoyevsky jean-paul sartre simone de beauvoir and franz fanon the main premises of this school is that there's no meaning in the world in itself there is no god and there is no objective morality sarcher claimed that existence precedes essence we must create our own moral systems and values rather than having them pre-endowed simone de beauvoir explored the relationship between existential and social freedom and argued that even though there is no objective good and evil constraining the freedom of others through power is still what they call bad faith pessimism

17:42 pessimism is the view that life and existence have a negative value because the volume of pain in existence tends to outweigh the pleasure the fact that we are self-conscious is seen as a tragic side effect of evolution we're forced to contemplate our place in the universe and we just want a meaningful existence with a lack of pain sickness and death even though we can never achieve this arthur schopenhauer is probably the most famous figure of this view utilitarianism utilitarianism is a type of consequentialist ethics which argues that we should always try to maximize happiness and well-being through our actions this view was founded by jeremy bentham who understood utility as that property in any object whereby it tends

18:28 to produce benefit advantage pleasure good or happiness or to prevent the happening of mischief pain evil or unhappiness to the party whose interest is considered some other famous utilitarians include jon stewart mill and the contemporary philosopher peter singer ancient stoicism this is a layer deeper than contemporary stoicism since you got to get it straight from the source the main figures associated with it are marcus aurelius epictitus and seneca i won't go too deep into stoicism here because i already did in this other video so i'm just going to plug that again plato was right about democracy so plato thought that democracy isn't as good as it sounds because the skills you need to rule are different from the

19:13 skills you need to win an election plato would say that rulers should be chosen by reason and wisdom rather than the rhetoric and persuasion you need to win an election in plato's ideal society it is ruled by philosopher kings virtue ethics this is a system of ethics developed by aristotle and other ancient greek philosophers in contrast to consequential or deontological ethics virtue ethics emphasizes the individual's character in this view as long as we focus on being good people we'll end up naturally doing the right things aristotle identified about 18 core virtues that everyone should strive towards achieving and each of these virtues is understood as the golden mean between corresponding

19:58 excesses and deficiencies for example courage is understood as the golden mean between rashness and cowardice marxism who boy something something material conditions the mode of production influencing society the base and superstructure honestly if you want to understand marxism the best thing i can suggest is checking out the lecture series reading marx's capital with david harvey which is all on youtube he will explain it much better than i could ever hope to optimism this isn't just the glass half full idea that everything will just work itself out in the end this is a philosophical idea that's usually associated with leibniz who argued that we live in the best of all possible worlds his argument basically goes like this god has the

20:46 idea of infinitely many universes only one of these universes can actually exist god's choices are subject to the principle of sufficient reason that is god has a reason to choose one thing or another god is good therefore the universe that god chose to exist is the best of all possible worlds meta ethics in the same way that metaphysics goes beyond physics meta ethics goes beyond ethics meta-ethicists deal with questions like what do moral judgments even mean is morality objective or how can we know whether moral judgments are true the world of forms this is plato's metaphysics which claims that the physical world is not the real

21:33 or true world and that what is actually real is the absolute ideas or forms that underpin what we would usually understand as real in this view everything we perceive in the world are just imitations of the non-physical essences of what they are humanism this is a pretty broad and vague philosophical stance that emphasizes human beings as the starting point for philosophical inquiry it's also usually associated with secularism and a reliance on science and reason for a humanist you don't need religion to determine your values and morals you can achieve a good and meaningful life by shaping your own values aesthetics contrary to popular belief this isn't just the vaporwave meme of spacing out the letters in text it's a branch of

22:19 philosophy that concerns itself with the nature of beauty and what we find pleasing when we're looking at visual art or listening to music or reading poetry or just wandering through nature jbp on post-modernism this refers to the controversial canadian psychologist jordan b peterson and his profound misunderstanding of post-modern philosophy like its interchangeability with marxism for instance if you want to deep dive into this there's a really good video by cck philosophy on the subject [Music] plato had no beliefs it was all socrates socrates famously didn't write down any of his thoughts because he valued the back and forth dialogue that happens in conversation and felt that writing was

23:06 too authoritative because there are a lot of contradictory accounts of socrates it's pretty much impossible to figure out his actual philosophy a lot of what we know about socrates comes from him being a main character in a lot of plato's dialogues most historians believe that in the later dialogues plato used socrates as a mouthpiece for his own ideas and this entry of the meme claims that everything plato wrote was all just socrates and plato didn't have any beliefs of his own radical freedom salt the central idea of the existentialist philosopher jean-paul salter is radical freedom and responsibility writing that we are condemned to be free we're thrown into the world without choice we just kind of show up here as humans but now we're responsible for everything we do

23:53 this is tied to his idea that existence precedes essence only the individual determines one's character goals purpose and so on hegel is thesis antithesis synthesis this is talking about hegel's dialectics which is used to study things in order to make implicit contradictions explicit this process involves a thesis which gives rise to a reaction the antithesis which contradicts or negates the thesis and the tension between the thesis and antithesis become resolved through a synthesis this is probably the most popular aspect of hegel's thought but from what i've read it's really not as significant as it's made out to be it definitely appears sometimes but it's not a dominant element of his work one thing that is dominant is triads

24:38 there's always three of everything if hegel writes about any given thing he'll split it up into three parts and then three component parts of that and so on his main intellectual move is to break things into three parts schopenhauer will schopenhauer drew heavily from immanuel kant he interpreted kant as showing that space time and causality do not exist in the world but are features of our minds that we use to construct our experience so it follows that the world as we experience it with objects in space and time which have causal relationships all depend on the mind for their existence he described this idealist position influenced by content barclay when he wrote the world is my representation kant believed that there must be something independent of us that

25:24 mediates our representation of the external world which we have no direct access to kant posited mind-independent transcendental objects which is what causes these representations but schopenhauer didn't agree with this part since he still understood causality as a feature of the mind and did not want things in themselves of the external world to be the source of these representations in a causal kind of way instead of looking to something independent schopenhauer instead looked inward and argued that the inner core of our being is what underlies everything there is an unconscious instinct or force characterized by a restless striving he called this will and that our bodies are a manifestation of will which he ties to the survival instinct to live as well as the instinct to reproduce but he also didn't reduce this

26:11 just to living organisms he believed that this will penetrates and underlies all of reality ready at hand ready at hand is part of a distinction drawn by the philosopher heidegger to describe the attitudes we have towards things in the world present at hand is the neutral attitude of a scientist or a theorist who's trying to observe and make sense of something this attitude is only concerned with the bare facts of a thing and has no concept of its history or its utility in contrast ready at hand is a more involved attitude that views things as useful in order to achieve something for example a hammer is ready at hand because we use it for certain purposes without any theorizing german idealism german idealism was a philosophical movement in surprise

26:58 surprise germany which mostly grew from the work of immanuel kant some important figures include ficta shelling and hegel kant's transcendental idealism which was a bit more modest than the german idealists still viewed things in themselves as real and that they affect our minds and produce sensations but we still can't have knowledge of these things in themselves based on how they appear to us but as ficht argued the idea of these things in themselves objects which are not objects for us and exist independently of consciousness is a contradiction in terms this is because the thing is only a thing when it is something for us even though there are still a lot of metaphysical differences between the main german idealists this more radical idealism is the basis for this movement critical theory

27:44 critical theory refers to a wide range of theories that take surprisingly a critical view of society in the human sciences it also refers to the frankfurt school particularly the writings of adorno marcus habermas and some others the main goal of the critical theorists is to theorize about what's usually taken for granted to hopefully promote a free society that removes the illusions of ideology rather than just trying to understand or explain society critical theory wants to critique it and change it drawing from all the major social sciences like economics sociology history political science psychology geography and more the biggest influences on critical theory include people like marx hegel and freud oedipus complex

28:31 this is probably one of the most famous ideas from psychoanalysis freud believed that every single young boy goes through a phase in life where he sometimes unconsciously hates his father and wants to have sex with his mother this theory is named after the mythological story of oedipus who accidentally fulfilled the prophecy that he would kill his father and marry his mother pretty much all modern psychologists don't agree with this theory but even if we take it seriously it doesn't really make sense if you have same-sex parents and it also totally contradicts the widespread taboo and disgust most people have towards incest throwness this is another concept from heidegger it refers to the fact that as humans we are thrown into the world without any

29:16 prior consent we're completely arbitrarily thrown into life and are met with frustrations suffering and responsibilities this might remind you of jean-paul sartre's idea of radical freedom that i was talking about earlier and you would be smart to think that because the existentialists drew heavily from heidegger and concepts of his like throneness structuralism post-structuralism post-structuralism as you might guess is an extension of the earlier movement structuralism structuralism is usually associated with the swiss linguist ferdinand de socie so looked at language like words and broke it up into two parts the sound of the word the signifier and what the word represents the signified the union of the signifier and the

30:04 signified is called the sign he pointed out that the association between signifiers and signified is arbitrary but how about this example the word snake refers to the slithering animal with no legs but it also refers to someone who is two-faced and backstabs you and it can also act as part of the symbol for the world health organization and these are all very different meanings this signification works in a chain where snake refers to an animal which represents someone who is two-faced which represents betrayal which is an example of immorality and so on the radical post structuralist would argue that this chain of signification is infinite some notable post-structuralists include roland barthe jacques derrida michel foucault gile de

30:50 luz and john bodreaud if you want a more sophisticated understanding of post-structuralism there is a great youtube video by christopher bolton who uses some intuitive diagrams to help explain it the pleasure principle this is another concept from freud which refers to the instinct of chasing pleasure and avoiding pain which is a part of the freudian id the instinctual component of our personality in freud's psychological theory mindedness mine in this is a characteristic of existence described by heidegger it refers to the fact that things don't just float around in the world but are always there in relation to me for heidegger a thing exists but it is also there concerning a particular perspective of being for example when

31:36 someone tells me something i don't just hear it in a universal abstract kind of way but i hear it in a particular language at a particular place and time and all of this gives me contextual meaning about what i'm being told the will to power common interpretation the will to power is a concept in nietzsche's work that draws from schopenhauer it's commonly understood that he thought it was the main driving force or instinct of humans but this concept was not very well defined in his writings so there's a lot of different interpretations in the literature this power is not understood as just chasing physical power military power or political power it's a much more broad concept the will to power can manifest as the desire of the philosopher or the

32:21 scientist to direct their will to truth or the artist to direct their will to create or the businessman to become wealthy for nietzsche the world is essentially a landscape of competing forces when these forces clash there's resistance and the will to power is the urge to overcome this resistance in contrast to schopenhauer's emphasis on darwinian self-preservation the will to power is a striving towards becoming more the society of the spectacle the society of the spectacle is a text by gui de bard and is associated with marxism and critical theory debord was a key part of the situationist international which was an organization of artists intellectuals and political theorists the situationists pointed out that the advancement of capitalism in

33:08 the 20th century caused a shift in the way we express ourselves rather than authentically expressing ourselves through lived experience we instead express ourselves indirectly through consumption and commodities this shift is seen as a big problem for society which damages everyone's quality of life and it's also tied to the rise of mass media and how it has created a structure where image is more important than authentic genuine human interaction writing that all that was once directly lived has become mere representation the death drive the death drive is a concept in freudian psychoanalysis and it basically means what it says on the tin it's the drive towards death and destruction which acts in opposition to the pleasure principle on the other hand it could also be seen

33:54 as a part of schopenhauer's work as i mentioned earlier schopenhauer understood that all of existence is a metaphysical will which is affirmed by pleasure his pessimistic view that life produces more suffering than happiness led to the idea that affirming the will is immoral and that the death drive is a kind of negation of this will nietzsche as an existentialist nietzsche is commonly seen as a major influence to later movements in philosophy like existentialism and post-modernism the biggest connection to existentialism was nietzsche's proclamation that god is dead as society and culture progressed and religion became less emphasized nietzsche became concerned with the lack of a unifying truth to guide humanity this laid the foundation for existentialism with the

34:39 claims that there is no meaning in the world itself there is no god and there is no objective morality [Music] understanding hegel hegel's work particularly the phenomenology of spirit is notorious for being extremely difficult to understand part of this might have to do with the translation from german but the ideas he explores are also extremely complicated to truly understand exactly how dense this work is i'll just say that this guy gregory b sadler on youtube created a series of 330 half hour videos which each explore a single paragraph of the phenomenology of spirit supposedly once you reach level

35:27 four you can finally understand hegel elac arak ack these are all sects of accelerationism the philosophy of nick land accelerationism is basically the idea that the societal processes we're witnessing now like capitalist growth and technological change should be accelerated and intensified as much as possible to create radical social change which might include a potential technological singularity el ack refers to leftists who accept accelerationism and our ack refers to people on the right who accept accelerationism and you ack refers to unconditional accelerationism deconstruction this is an approach to philosophy created by jacques derrida don't be confused by the name it's not about

36:14 deconstructing or taking apart an argument darida was concerned with logocentrism which is the assumption that absolute truth can be discovered through language he thought that this logocentrism was a major mistake in the history of western philosophy and wanted to argue that the subjective nature of language makes it a useless pursuit darida believed that much of this logocentrism in philosophy has to do with binaries like nature versus culture speech versus writing man vs woman heterosexual versus homosexual he points out that binaries usually involve a primary or privileged side which we usually list first like light and dark hot and cold good and bad high and low inside and outside speech and writing

37:00 and so on he argues that it's actually the unprivileged term that sets the conditions for the binary itself which identifies how the two opposing sides of the binary are not as separate as we might initially think we can't have a concept of darkness without lightness and vice versa this exposes how the cutoff point between each side of the binary is not static it's always relative and can shift back and forth bertrand russell was a psyop bertrand russell was a british philosopher mathematician and logician who is most well known as one of the founders of analytic philosophy and he wrote principia mathematica with alfred north whitehead which was a major development of classical logic along with ge moore he was part of the british revolt against idealism which was the dominant perspective of british

37:46 philosophy at the time he wrote that with a sense of escaping a prison we allowed ourselves to think that grass is green that the sun and stars would exist if no one was aware of them a psychological operation or a psyop is a form of psychological warfare where some authority attempts to invoke a pre-planned psychological reaction in the population an example of this comes from the vietnam war which involved the united states running a number of psychological operations including playing tapes of distorted human sounds during the night to make the vietnamese soldiers think that their dead enemies were back for revenge this entry in the iceberg jokingly claims that bertrand russell himself was all a psyop of some kind so the conspiracy goes bertrand russell was sponsored by the british government to

38:32 bring down philosophy by creating the analytic continental split nietzsche through post-structuralism this is referring to the association between nietzsche's philosophy and the later movement of post-structuralism in the 20th century i don't know too much about the literature on this but i did find some interesting parallels one connection is that nietzsche famously criticized socrates in descartes who the post-structuralists also criticized nietzsche was also very concerned with binary oppositions like good and evil or the christ in antichrist which might remind you of daredevil's deconstruction and how that relates to the reversal of binary pairs nietzsche's famous quote there are no facts only interpretations also mirrors darada's quote there is

39:17 nothing outside the text schizoanalysis schizoanalysis is a concept attributed to the work of postmodernist philosophers giles de luz and felix gattari which is present in their books anti-oedipus and a thousand plateaus it could be understood as a new materialist approach to psychiatry which was developed in response to the shortcomings of psychoanalysis in opposition to psychoanalysis schizoanalysis also emphasizes the social and economic contexts as a driver for mental illness and challenges the idea that it is a defect of some kind while psychoanalysis tries to arrive at a higher level authoritative judgment of psychopathologies schizoanalysis forces us to see mental illness in the context

40:02 of the material environment desiring production this is also a concept in the work of deluse and guitare it's based on a fundamental disagreement with freud freud believed that the unconscious is a representational theater where a desire is always tied to a lack instead delusion guitare argued that desire is an actual productive force desire is a positive process without a lack this desiring machine is also embedded in a larger context of other interconnected desiring machines they write there are no desiring machines that exist outside the social machines that they form on a large scale and no social machines without the desiring machines that inhabit them on a small scale

40:47 the body without organs this is also a concept in the work of duluz and guitari it's a pretty complicated concept but my understanding is it basically refers to an abstract structure of components without any imposed organization you can think about it as a machine that frees the human animal from instincts and social influence it's a body that has the capacity to settle into a bunch of different functions and forms without yet taking on any of those functions and forms it's like a collection of potentialities rhizomes in the plant sciences a rhizome is a plant stem that sends out roots from its nodes growing horizontally in the philosophy of daluz and gatari they use

41:33 rhizome as a concept to describe systems that have no clear beginning or end like the internet these systems are non-hierarchical and are described in contrast to arborescent structures which are basically tree-like hierarchies they apply this structure to culture instead of conceptualizing culture as a chronological narrative it understands it as a map or a set of attractions and influences with no precise origin the will to power to lose interpretation deluse understood nietzsche's concept of the will to power in a backwards kind of way he writes power as a will to power is not that which the will wants but that which wants in the will power doesn't mean that the will wants

42:19 power or wishes to dominate but power animates the will power is inseparable from willing there is no willing without power disciplinary society this concept comes from the french postmodernist philosopher michel foucault he argues that the mechanisms of discipline that emerged in institutions like schools and prisons have expanded out to society as a whole foucault takes jeremy bentham's idea of a panopticon the modern structure for a jail where there is a watchtower in the middle and separate cells surrounding it prisoners in the panopticon can't see each other or the guard but the guard can see everybody this creates a scenario where you don't know when you're being watched so you always have

43:04 to act as if you were the prisoner becomes his own guard this is a very efficient structure because you can exert control over a lot of people with very minimal effort since you only need one guard or maybe even no guards foucault claims that the panopticon is not just an architectural structure of prisons but it's a paradigmatic case of a technology of power panopticism it's the way in which we organize social spaces and the people within it to make it as productive efficient and obedient as possible once this panopticon expands throughout the whole market economy we live in a society we live in a disciplinary society the accursed share the accursed share is a book about political economy written by georges

43:51 bataille he presents an economic theory that he calls general economy a problem batai identifies is that economics studies its phenomena in isolation and doesn't take into account how economic activity affects the world or how the world affects economic activity he calls this restrictive economy bataille understands the accursed share as the excessive part of the economy that has to be spent on luxury without any gain like on non-procreative sexuality spectacles war and so on the growth or expansion of an organism always reaches some limit that prohibits further growth so the excess energy must be wasted on luxury the nature of a society is understood as the form and role of this luxury

44:37 limit experience the idea of a limit experience is another concept associated with georges bataille limit experiences are a type of experience that approaches the edge of living in its intensity which breaks down the boundaries of pain and pleasure at one point in his life someone showed bataille a photograph of someone experiencing ling shi or death by a thousand cuts which is a chinese torture method where someone's body is slowly cut into pieces but tai hung this photograph on his wall and looked at it pretty often he saw it as an example of these limit experiences he noticed that the victim's face looked almost blissful and he wrote that he was struck by the fact that these two complete contrasts were identical divine ecstasy and extreme horror

45:24 batail attempted to live his life at the edge of limits where one's ability to even comprehend experience breaks down cybernetics cybernetics is a science defined by norbert weiner a mathematician and philosopher it refers to the study of communication and control theory emphasizing how automatic control systems compare like the biological nervous system technological systems and social systems the word cybernetics comes from the greek word that means to steer as we steer a ship we're trying to move towards a goal while we get blown off course with wind which causes us to constantly correct our trajectory to stay moving towards the goal from a cybernetic perspective all intelligent systems have this property of trying

46:11 things acting seeing what's happened changing actions and looping through this process in a self-correcting way hyper-reality hyper-reality is a concept introduced by the post-modern philosopher beautyriald in simulacra and simulation it's about how as conscious beings we can't distinguish reality from a simulation of reality especially in the technologically advanced society we live in today it's a condition where what is real and what is fiction are seamlessly blended together and we can't tell where one ends and the other begins now this simulation isn't the nick bostrom idea that all of reality is a kind of matrix computer simulation but instead how modern mass media and cultural symbols have changed the way we

46:57 construct an interface with reality a good example baudrillard uses is disneyland which is an intense cascade of symbols which all serve to preserve and communicate the magic of disney products and media which is more real than real a lot of the disney symbols have their roots in european fairy tales which have continuously evolved over hundreds of years slowly shifting away from the underlying reality they actually represented at this point all the symbols of disneyland are many steps removed from reality with disneyland it's fairly obvious that this fantasy world is not real but there are other examples that are a bit more subtle like a hamburger from mcdonald's when you decide to get a double cheeseburger you tend to imagine the double cheeseburger presented to you

47:43 in advertisements rather than the actual burger they'll end up serving you which is usually pretty soggy and pathetic the way that we act and perceive the world through these idealized fabricated symbols is what baudrillard means when he says that we live in a hyper reality the nomadic war machine this is another concept from daluz and gatari we haven't escaped them quite yet in simple terms the war machine is an abstract concept that refers to that which allows for possibility this is understood in opposition to the state which is concerned with limiting possibility but at the same time the war machine can also be co-opted by the state itself to serve its own ends and at this point the war machine becomes associated with actual military war so they claim that the origin of the war

48:29 machine is connected to nomadic people people who have no set place to live and they just wander around nomadic people are contrasted with the state which wants to organize and regulate the physical world the nomadic attitude just passes through the world and doesn't try to impose any organization onto it [Music] we are ultimately nothing but an effect of the sun i think this is in reference to georges bataille's theory of general economy which i talked a little bit about in the previous level but points out that the sun is the ultimate source of all life and wealth on earth that's needed to sustain growth life and reproduction but this sunlight is excessive it produces way more energy than is actually used by the life that

49:15 it facilitates this solar excess is necessary for life to also be excessive rather than understanding organisms as some kind of rational actors motivated by scarcity like they do in classical economics but thai understands organisms to have an excess of energy available to it which can be used productively for growth or sustainability or just expended on luxury hegel and hermeneutics hegel was a major figure in the development of hermeneutics which is the theory of interpretation one major idea he made popular was that it's not just linguistic texts and spoken phrases that require interpretation but also non-linguistic arts like architecture paintings and instrumental music nowadays it's just taken for granted that hermeneutics can be applied to

50:02 non-linguistic communication but that's all thanks to hegel blockchain solves the space-time problem this is in reference to a youtube video by nick land from 2016 where he tries to argue for a relationship between blockchain technology and the philosophy of time the problem of space time according to einstein is that there's no such thing as absolute succession so there can't be time in a sense that is distinct from a dimension and this is why spacetime is treated as a fourth dimensional structure this is because if you have two clocks in different parts of space it's very hard to establish if they are synchronized because any signal you send from one clock to another will take time even if you're sending signals at the speed of light there's still a lag the bitcoin white paper which

50:48 outlines the proof of work blockchain is supposedly able to solve the synchronization problem which land claims is identical to the space-time problem the political compass is a hyperstation hyperstation is a concept also created by nick land a hyperstation in simple terms is a fiction that makes itself real or in nickeland's words the experimental technoscience of self-fulfilling prophecies an idea emerges in culture and then causes a positive feedback cycle where it becomes real this entry in the meme claims that the political compass which classifies political positions on the axes of left-right and authoritarian libertarian is a hyperstation so essentially before the origin of this

51:34 framework people did not really fit into these kinds of classifications but after the framework emerged in culture people's perspectives started to conform to this framework tribute explains hyper reality so i'm not totally sure about this one but this is my best guess i think the word tribute here might be referring to a tribute act or an amateur band that plays covers of a well-known band some examples of this include the iron maidens an all-female band paying tribute to iron maiden or piss a tribute act to kiss the process of bands whose existence is a tribute to another band can be understood as baudrillard's simulacrum which is a representation or imitation of a person or thing in baudrillard's

52:20 view these simulacrums are not direct copies of the real authentic thing but they become true in their own right and become hyper-real kant through nick land bataille through nick land nick land has a unique perspective on the works of immanuel kant as well as georges bataille let's start with his treatment of kant which is part of most of his work but is closely associated with kant capital and the prohibition of incest in very simple terms land hated kant he argued that you can trace the modern structure of capitalist society to the transcendental philosophy of immanuel kant as far as bataille goes one of nickland's claims to fame was his book the thirst for annihilation which was the first book in english to respond to bataille's writings

53:06 just to remind you but thai was very concerned with energy expenditure and how that relates to economics but is this structure of energy expenditure exclusive to economics maybe it can also be applied to cosmology it could be that the whole universe is just a byproduct of a process of endless expenditure an economy of consumption and excess that's totally indifferent to human thoughts and aspirations base materialism this is the ontological position of georges bataille which he developed to break away from mainstream materialism which he saw as being a subtle form of idealism he proposes an active base matter that disrupts the opposition of high and low and destabilizes all foundations all matter is considered

53:51 libidinally powered and productive and this idea of materialism is very influenced by gnosticism and doesn't really have a strict definition or rationalization gender accelerationism gender accelerationism or g ack is an ideology about accelerating gender to the point that there's no longer any internal logic to it to truly reach a point where the lgbtq plus community can live without fear of any kind of discrimination gender accelerationists argue that we must continuously create more and more genders until the whole logic of gender collapses the solar anus the solar anus is a short surrealist text by georges bataille it's structured as a series of aphorisms that deal with

54:37 topics like death and decay natural disasters impotence and feces it points out that even though the sun brings life to earth it can also cause death with its powerful energy connecting to bataille's idea of excess it discusses the anus as a symbol for inevitable waste or luxury gender hacking from what i researched it seems like gender hacking is a concept related to xenofeminism and feminist accelerationism this is a niche but broad perspective associated with people like helen hester and is concerned with questions like how technology can liberate women from the tyranny of their own biology a reference point for this is beatrice priciato who uses black market testosterone to hack her own body

55:22 to explore how these substances can transform her body and experience of the world which she calls the auto guinea pig principle god is a lobster so when i first read this i thought it was a reference to jordan peterson and his famous fascination with lobsters but it turns out it's an out of context quote from duluth and guitarist a thousand plateaus for duluth god is a lobster a double pincered abstract machine of natural stratification god in this sense is only seen as a part of nature and this is an important break from the western tradition in philosophy that can be linked to figures like aristotle and kant who view the organism as the judgment of god ultimately the claim that god is a lobster is both

56:09 tongue-in-cheek and also deadly serious it's a critical statement that exposes the illusion of the organism as the judgment of god heraclitus was the first post-structuralist heraclitus was an ancient greek pre-socratic philosopher one of his famous quotes actually has some interesting parallels with post-structural ontology as this meme suggests post-structuralism broadly understands existence as being a complex process that doesn't follow the rigidity of grand narratives which try to identify a singular capital t truth about reality all the processes that comprise reality are continuously in a state of transformation now heraclitus said you can never step in the same river twice plato's reading of heraclitus interprets

56:54 this as suggesting that all things are in flux and the nature of reality is that nothing is constant except for change instead of reality being reality is becoming which really parallels the post-structuralist ontology societies of control this is a reference to deluse's essay postscript on the societies of control in this essay he argues that we're in the process of entering into a new kind of society societies of control are in opposition to foucault's disciplinary societies which i talked about in level four in this new society of control imposing power doesn't require enclosing people into spaces like schools factories or prisons as in the disciplinary society in societies of control this power is imposed throughout

57:41 all of society the smartphone is a pretty good example of this in a disciplinary society power must be imposed by limiting human behavior in action but with smartphones we're actually encouraged to use them freely which still serves to impose power by collecting our personal data and selling it to governments and corporations these new techniques for controlling and monitoring us aren't even seen as that at all but as free actions we're carrying out there's a really good video about societies of control by cck philosophy if you want to dig into this a bit deeper beaudriard's metaphysics so from what i can tell most of beaudrier's metaphysical takes come from fatal strategies and the biggest theme has to do with the object superseding the subject related to his idea of hyper

58:28 reality he points out how objects in culture are continuously surpassing themselves the beauty in the fashion industry is more beautiful than beautiful and television is becoming more real than real and pornographic sex is becoming more sexual than sex this expansion and intensification of objects like goods services and information has reached such an extreme that it comes with a certain inertia for the subject and these objects end up dominating in defeating the subject the libidinal band the libidinal band is a concept from the french postmodernist philosopher jean francois leotard a lot of leotard's philosophy is based around freud's idea of the libido in leotard's understanding of reality reality doesn't consist of

59:14 some kind of structure or being but a bunch of unpredictable events which he calls libidinal intensities and affects which can also be understood as feelings or desires but in a counter-intuitive way he sees this libidinal description of reality as a theoretical fiction or a way to talk about reality that gives us useful terms for theorizing about the world the libidinal band is like a body in the form of a mobius strip which serves as a surface of reality where libidonal intensities pass through the great zero the great zero is also a concept from leotard and it's related to his critique of reason and representation representation is the standard model of rational thought in western philosophy where the human subject represents the

1:00:01 objective world to itself in its subjective mind for leotard this model of representation has a problem because it places the actual reality that representation refers to in a kind of transcendent realm the great zero is the divide between the representation and what it represents and this representation is seen as nihilistic in the same way that nietzsche sees religion as nihilistic religion for nietzsche places the highest values in a transcendent realm that we can't access which cuts us off from these highest values and devalues what we actually experience directly for leotard representation follows the same pattern because we can never bridge the gap between representation and reality so this cuts us off as representational

1:00:49 thinkers from accessing reality trump is a kantian this is in reference to an interview on youtube with someone who seems to be at a trump rally over the course of three minutes this guy goes on a very bizarre and obscure rant about how trump will save the world by completing kant's philosophical system and claims that trump is a kantian and german idealist [ __ ] he could not complete the system of german idealism trump is going to complete the system he's going to derive the complete system idealism first critique published in 1781 trump is a kantian hyper pop is accelerationist hyper pop is a recent musical genre

1:01:35 that's attributed to a lot of artists and is usually associated with a.g cook and people related to his pc music record label including musicians like charlie xcx and the late sophie hyper pop is a very exaggerated and self-referential kind of pop music usually characterized by brash intense synth melodies excessively auto-tuned vocals and nostalgic references to 2000's internet culture [Music] this meme claims that hyper pop is a kind of accelerationist music accelerationism is something i touched on earlier and basically has to do with the idea that social processes should be

1:02:22 intensified or accelerated as much as possible to cause social change thanatos and eros in freud's dialectic in ancient greek mythology thanatos was the personification of death and eros is the personification of love and sex freud described a dialectic between two primary instincts thanatos or the death instinct and eros the life instinct while eros is concerned with things like procreation social cooperation and survival thanatos is related to aggression risky or self-destructive behavior and trauma thanatos accelerationism so freud's thanatos and arrows dialectic comes up occasionally in nicholann's

1:03:08 book fanged numina which deals a lot with accelerationism i spent a while trying to wrap my head around how exactly land incorporates thanatos here and the best i got was this passage which i'm still struggling to make sense of inorganic thanatos rex order organic aeros preserves it and as the carbon dominium is softened up by machine plague deterritorializing replicants of nomad's cyber revolution come in upon the re-territorializing reproducers of the sedentary human security system hacking into the macropod libidinal materialism this concept is also related to nick land's work land wants to move towards a philosophy that is non-intentional or

1:03:53 non-teleological which mirrors delusion guitari in that it conceptualizes desire not as a lack a representation or intention as freud would understand it but as its own productive force desire is seen as a kind of energetic flow an intro to bataille that isn't porn so batail is famous for incorporating transgressive ideas into his work for the sake of it in order to break free from the expectations and norms of society and culture one of batail's most famous works that's probably the starting point for a lot of people is the story of the eye which was initially interpreted by the public as pure pornography because of its strong themes and depictions of bizarre sexual perversions

1:04:38 since then scholars have started to interpret the story a bit more charitably and see that it also has the same philosophical depth of a lot of his non-fiction work the lemurian time war so this one is pretty out there this idea is associated with the ccru or the cybernetic culture research unit which was a collective of cultural theorists prominent in the 90s and some important figures associated with this collective include sadie plant and none other than nick land the lemurian time war has its origins in a fictional story by william s burrows the ghost lemurs of madagascar this story involves a character who finds a free libertarian colony who seem

1:05:23 to uphold lemurs as divine beings the story involves a lot of time and space [ __ ] with these lemurs like the passage ring-tailed cat lemurs appeared parading back and forth around one another tales quivering about their heads then whisk they were gone drawing back the space they had been away with them these lemurs are described as thinking and feeling in a fundamentally different way from humans in a way that's not oriented towards time and sequence and causality the ccru saw this as a kind of literary metaphor for a kantian view

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