Latest / Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs / Season 3, Episode 7: Bryan W. Van Norden, Taking Back Philosophy: A Multicultural Manifesto

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Season 3, Episode 7: Bryan W. Van Norden, Taking Back Philosophy: A Multicultural Manifesto · Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs

0:00
SPEAKER_01: Hello, I'm Jeffrey Sachs.
0:01
SPEAKER_01: Welcome to Book Club, a monthly conversation with world-leading authors who have written scintillating, inspiring, and remarkably important books about history, social justices, and the challenges of building a decent world.
0:18
SPEAKER_01: Hello, welcome to Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs.
0:22
SPEAKER_01: And today I am absolutely thrilled to have a phenomenal world-leading philosopher and a dear friend, uh Brian Van Norden.
0:32
SPEAKER_01: Brian Van Norden is the James Monroe Taylor Chair in Philosophy at Vassar College from 2017 to 2020.
0:41
SPEAKER_01: He was also a professor at the Yale National University of Singapore College in Singapore.
0:48
SPEAKER_01: So I'll I want to ask about that, Brian.
0:51
SPEAKER_01: But welcome to the book club.
0:53
SPEAKER_01: Today we're going to be speaking about a manifesto of yours, a multicultural manifesto called Taking Back Philosophy.
1:02
SPEAKER_01: So I'm absolutely thrilled to do so.
1:05
SPEAKER_01: And let me say for listeners that in uh recent years I've tried to begin to understand uh Chinese philosophy, Confucianism, and other major bodies of thought.
1:21
SPEAKER_01: And when I started that, I asked a mutual friend of Brian and mine, Owen Flanagan, a great philosopher at Duke University, what should I do to get started?
1:33
SPEAKER_01: And he said, Of course, uh you have to listen to Brian Van Norden's introduction to classical Chinese philosophy.
1:40
SPEAKER_01: And I say listen, by the way, because I can't show the book because I listened to it walking in uh audio book form.
1:48
SPEAKER_01: And walking and philosophy actually has a long history together, at least in uh Western tradition, because uh the peripatetic philosophers Aristotle and his school walked uh walked and talked.
2:01
SPEAKER_01: So I I listened, I I walked and listened, and the book was so good and so fascinating.
2:07
SPEAKER_01: I asked Owen, well, what next?
2:09
SPEAKER_01: Uh and he said, Well, you better look at a manifesto.
2:13
SPEAKER_01: So this was uh how I got to know taking back philosophy, uh, a multicultural manifesto.
2:20
SPEAKER_01: So, Brian, it's uh it's really wonderful to be with you.
2:24
SPEAKER_01: And what is this manifesto for people listening in today?
2:28
SPEAKER_00: Well, thank you so much for having me on the show, Jeff.
2:30
SPEAKER_00: And uh, like many people, I'm a great admirer of you and all that you've done for the world.
2:36
SPEAKER_00: But uh the manifesto came about because my friend and colleague Jay Garfield and I were at a conference together and we were bemoaning the fact that there are very few philosophy departments in the West in general and in the English-speaking world where they actually teach Chinese philosophy or Indian philosophy or Africana philosophy or indigenous American philosophy.
3:03
SPEAKER_00: And Jeff just, we were just having coffee, and Jeff said, you know what, uh, these departments, if they're not going to teach anything outside the Anglo-European canon, then they should just call themselves departments of Western philosophy instead of pretending that they actually have a cosmopolitan approach.
3:20
SPEAKER_00: Or I think he also might have said they should just call themselves departments of white boy philosophy instead of actual philosophy.
3:27
SPEAKER_00: And I said, that's a really great point.
3:29
SPEAKER_00: Why don't we write an op-ed piece about that and get the word out?
3:32
SPEAKER_00: So we co-wrote one and we thought, well, let's just give it a shot and see if the New York Times wants to post it.
3:39
SPEAKER_00: And to our pleasant surprise, the Times did post it and it came out as if philosophy departments won't diversify, let's call them what they really are.
3:50
SPEAKER_00: Um, and it got a lot of attention, some of it very positive, but also some people complained that we were failing to recognize the intrinsic superiority of Western civilization, um, or we were trying to water down the curriculum.
4:08
SPEAKER_01: Or the claim that you mentioned that philosophy is intrinsically only Western, that there is no such thing as uh Eastern philosophy, for example.
4:18
SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
4:18
SPEAKER_00: And several people actually said in print, they said, well, the thing you guys don't understand is that philosophy is from a Greek term, philosophia, the love of wisdom, and therefore the only real philosophy is the philosophy that goes back to Plato and Aristotle.
4:36
SPEAKER_00: Um, and the thing is, if you actually, you know, read my book, Introduction to Classical Chinese Philosophy, if you actually read it, you discover there are these very rich traditions outside of the tradition that goes back to Plato and Aristotle.
4:49
SPEAKER_00: So anyway, we got this all this attention with the op-ed, and it caused a lot of controversy.
4:53
SPEAKER_00: And so Columbia University Press invited us to write a book based on the op-ed, and Jay was too busy to help with it, but he agreed to write the forew to what became Taking Back Philosophy, a multicultural manifesto, which has gotten a lot, again, a lot of positive attention, but also a lot of critics from ethnocentric people who want to believe that the only philosophical traditions are the ones that go back to Plato and Aristotle, which just isn't true if you merely look at other parts of the world.
5:25
SPEAKER_00: And taking back philosophy addresses some of the fallacious arguments that are given against teaching Chinese or Africana or Indian philosophy, and it gives examples of some of the ways that non-Western and Western philosophy can be brought into dialogue.
5:42
SPEAKER_00: It also looks at some of the political implications of how philosophy is taught and the politics of philosophy, not just in the US but around the world.
5:53
SPEAKER_00: And now it's been translated into Chinese and is available in China, and there's also an Arabic uh translation in the work as well.
6:02
SPEAKER_00: So we're getting the word out at least.
6:04
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, some of the uh data that you present right at the beginning was stunning to me that how little Chinese philosophy is actually taught in the United States, even among the major universities with large philosophy departments.
6:19
SPEAKER_01: Uh and the same with Indian philosophy, Buddhist philosophy, very little coverage, actually.
6:25
SPEAKER_01: And I was rather shocked at that.
6:27
SPEAKER_00: It's utterly amazing.
6:29
SPEAKER_00: So there's about a hundred doctoral programs in philosophy in the United States, and only about 13% of those have anyone who could plausibly supervise a dissertation on Chinese philosophy.
6:46
SPEAKER_00: And certainly Ivy League universities are not the be-all and end-all uh of academia, but there's no Ivy League university that has a philosophy department that has a regular faculty member who could supervise a dissertation on Chinese philosophy.
7:02
SPEAKER_00: That says a lot of I know, isn't that amazing?
7:05
SPEAKER_00: Consider how important China is in the world today.
7:08
SPEAKER_00: You know this, I know this.
7:09
SPEAKER_00: And it's actually worse for South Asian or Indian philosophy.
7:14
SPEAKER_00: And this is kind of an interesting historical tidbit.
7:18
SPEAKER_00: I always tell my students, they always want to ask me, well, is this philosophy or is it religion?
7:24
SPEAKER_00: And I say, well, what do we get by labeling something a religion as opposed to a philosophy?
7:31
SPEAKER_00: And part of the reason that Indian thought was labeled as religion is it gave imperialists a way to ignore Indian philosophy.
7:42
SPEAKER_00: And in a way that became very successful.
7:45
SPEAKER_00: And so now it's even rarer to find someone in a philosophy department in the English-speaking world who teaches Indian philosophy or South Asian philosophy, even though anybody who looks at Indian or South Asian philosophy immediately recognizes it as philosophical in a fairly familiar way.
8:03
SPEAKER_00: And then Africana philosophy is a sometimes useful label for both indigenous African philosophy and the philosophy of the African diaspora.
8:13
SPEAKER_00: So it includes both people who are from Africa, but then people of African descent in other parts of the world.
8:19
SPEAKER_00: So it's hard to categorize how much coverage there is of it.
8:23
SPEAKER_00: But of actual African philosophy, very few places, even fewer, that you can study African philosophy.
8:29
SPEAKER_00: And the last time I checked, there were, I think, two doctoral programs in philosophy in the United States where you could study indigenous American philosophy.
8:38
SPEAKER_00: Oh my God.
8:38
SPEAKER_01: It's it's so extraordinary.
8:41
SPEAKER_01: I turned to your introduction partly because uh I really love visiting China and admire Chinese civilization.
8:50
SPEAKER_01: Second, I was curious uh because after much too long a time, I really wanted to understand.
8:57
SPEAKER_01: So, what did Confucius actually say and the Confucian school?
9:02
SPEAKER_01: But the third, very practical point is as an international development economist, China's everywhere.
9:10
SPEAKER_01: China is nearly 20% of the world population.
9:14
SPEAKER_01: The economy, when measured at what we call purchasing power parity, is larger than the U.S.
9:21
SPEAKER_01: economy.
9:22
SPEAKER_01: China is the leading trade partner of most of the world now, uh, much more than uh having the U.S.
9:29
SPEAKER_01: as the lead trade partner.
9:31
SPEAKER_01: So you need to know something about it.
9:34
SPEAKER_01: If you add in India, which has the same population as China, now just a little bit higher, supposedly 1.4 billion in each, add in Africa, which is the same size, coincidentally, about 1.4 billion people over 55 separate countries in Africa, but uh 1.4 billion in the African Union.
9:57
SPEAKER_01: We're talking in just those three places, more than half the world population, and the West, as we call it, which I take to mean the United States and Canada, let's say, and Western Europe, Britain and continental Western Europe, that's 10% of the world population.
10:16
SPEAKER_01: So you would think naturally there would be a lot of intellectual curiosity about what's happening in the much bigger part of the world.
10:27
SPEAKER_01: And this is rather striking.
10:29
SPEAKER_01: And one of the fascinating points that you discuss is the change, actually, it seems, from the Western curiosity about China and Asia centuries ago to a kind of disdain.
10:43
SPEAKER_01: And if you could explain how that happened and some of the characters in that, I found that completely fascinating.
10:50
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, yes, exactly right.
10:53
SPEAKER_00: So, as as you know, when Western philosophers first learned about Chinese philosophy from Jesuit missionary accounts, the Jesuit missionaries who are themselves highly trained in Western philosophy immediately recognize Confucianism, for example, as philosophical.
11:10
SPEAKER_01: And Confucius is a Latin term.
11:13
SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
11:14
SPEAKER_00: Confucius, our word Confucius is a Latinization of Kung Fuza, which is a rare form of Kungza, which is the Chinese name for Confucius.
11:23
SPEAKER_01: Right.
11:24
SPEAKER_01: So even how we call him, that's from the Jesuits.
11:26
SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
11:27
SPEAKER_01: They brought it back, they gave him a Latin name.
11:29
SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
11:30
SPEAKER_00: They were that impressed with him.
11:31
SPEAKER_00: They wanted to write about him in Latin.
11:32
SPEAKER_00: So and then when the Jesuits reported this back in Europe, Western philosophers like Leibniz, who's a standard figure on any history of modern Western philosophy curriculum, very admiring of Chinese ethics.
11:46
SPEAKER_00: And Leibniz also thought that Chinese thinkers had independently discovered binary arithmetic, which Leibniz also discovered and became the basis of computers.
11:56
SPEAKER_00: And there was kind of a sinophilia, this kind of like a great admiration for what people understood Chinese philosophy to be in the Enlightenment.
12:05
SPEAKER_00: And then there's a really good book by my friend and colleague Peter K.J.
12:10
SPEAKER_00: Park, Africa, Asia, and the History of Philosophy, where he documents how attitudes towards Chinese, Indian, and African philosophy changed over time.
12:23
SPEAKER_00: And uh I'm a I'm a great admirer in some ways of the philosophy of Immanuel Kant.
12:28
SPEAKER_00: But the fact is that Kant bought into notions of white racial superiority.
12:34
SPEAKER_00: He lectured on anthropology, which is not as well known today, but in lecturing on anthropology, Kant ranked the races hierarchically with whites at the top, and then uh people of South Asian and East Asian descent underneath them and said they would never be capable of philosophy.
12:52
SPEAKER_00: They just weren't the right race to produce philosophy.
12:56
SPEAKER_00: And then he ranked people of African descent beneath that, and then people, indigenous American people, he ranked even at the very lowest level.
13:05
SPEAKER_00: And because of Kant's influence, his later followers rewrote the history of philosophy in European textbooks, and they wrote out Asia and Africa and the indigenous American traditions, so that people later could take it for granted without argument that there never was any philosophy beside the tradition that went back to Plato and Aristotle, even though the standard views before Kant were that philosophy began in Africa and from Africa it came to Greece, or philosophy first started in India, and from India philosophy came to ancient Greece.
13:44
SPEAKER_00: And again, Peter K.
13:45
SPEAKER_00: J.
13:45
SPEAKER_00: Park's book demonstrates this with a careful study of European philosophy textbooks.
13:50
SPEAKER_00: So it's not just a claim, you can actually document this.
13:53
SPEAKER_01: So it's it's really an amazing demonstration of how even high philosophy, because it can't get higher than Kant, and and uh supposedly the ultimate in understanding the basics of practical reason and understanding the most fundamental characteristics of human nature and so forth, reflect the changing power structure of the day.
14:19
SPEAKER_01: Because when the Jesuits first make contact with China, which is uh in the 16th century.
14:26
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, early 17th century or like at the end of the 16th, the early 17th century, yeah.
14:31
SPEAKER_01: There's no sense that China is a backward society, uh, you know, hopelessly uh outpaced.
14:38
SPEAKER_01: Uh, of course, when Marco Polo had visited centuries earlier, it was the unbelievable splendor of uh what he reported back.
14:48
SPEAKER_01: But by the time of Immanuel Kant, which is at the end of the 18th century, and then certainly into the 19th century with the industrialization of uh Britain first uh and then Europe and the United States, this sense of superiority taken to not only cultural superiority, but a pervasive belief among uh among some of the most hallowed of our thinkers in racial categories is absolutely a stunning, stunning change.
15:19
SPEAKER_00: It really is.
15:20
SPEAKER_00: And and as I think you're hinting, it it's connected with things like changes in economics.
15:26
SPEAKER_00: And so people needed a rationalization for economically exploiting India.
15:32
SPEAKER_00: They needed a rationalization for economically exploiting East Asia and China in particular.
15:39
SPEAKER_00: And arguing that people in these cultures were intellectually inferior to white people and white people were their natural masters provided that kind of rationalization.
15:49
SPEAKER_00: And I always say, I think that the majority of my colleagues in contemporary philosophy would reject the explicit racism of Kant's approach, but they accept the tainted fruit of it, which is the assumption that you can just say, oh no, there isn't any philosophy outside the tradition that goes back to Plato and Aristotle, even if you haven't tried to read any of the philosophy in the other traditions.
16:16
SPEAKER_01: That's one of the things, one of the things in your book, you quote people who say themselves, well, I haven't actually read it, but I know that it's worthless.
16:26
SPEAKER_00: Exactly, exactly.
16:27
SPEAKER_00: And people sometimes give me flack, they'll say, Well, why do you have to bring racism into it?
16:33
SPEAKER_00: You know, why can't you just appeal to ignorance?
16:35
SPEAKER_00: Ignorance is if you say, like, oh, I didn't know there was philosophy in China.
16:40
SPEAKER_00: That's really interesting.
16:41
SPEAKER_00: Tell me more.
16:42
SPEAKER_00: But something else has to be appealed to when people say, I haven't read this, but there isn't any philosophy, or I'm sure it's not any good.
16:51
SPEAKER_00: How are you sure of that?
16:53
SPEAKER_00: You know, and you wouldn't be sure if I were talking about a European thinker.
16:57
SPEAKER_00: It wouldn't occur to anybody to say if I said I was studying this understudied Swiss philosophical movement, no one would say, Oh, well, don't get me wrong, I I I like Swiss cheese and the cuckoo clocks and everything, but come on, those guys never did philosophy.
17:11
SPEAKER_00: No one would say that.
17:12
SPEAKER_00: But they feel very comfortable saying it about Indian philosophy or or East Asian philosophy.
17:18
SPEAKER_01: So I want to ask you just on your biographical level, you're a great and uh deep translator as well, which I want to ask you about because the challenge of translation in this case is profoundly interesting.
17:33
SPEAKER_01: But I read, uh, I don't know if it's correct, that when you expressed an interest in studying Chinese philosophy as a student, uh, your advisors said, Why would you want to do that?
17:45
SPEAKER_01: Is that correct?
17:46
SPEAKER_01: Is that accurate?
17:47
SPEAKER_00: That is a true story.
17:48
SPEAKER_00: And so uh, you know, I'm very grateful to my mentors as an undergraduate.
17:53
SPEAKER_00: Filial piety extends to being grateful to your teachers and all they did for you.
17:57
SPEAKER_00: But my teachers on the philosophy side said, Well, I don't really know if there is such a thing as Chinese philosophy.
18:03
SPEAKER_00: Maybe philosophy is just parochial to the West.
18:05
SPEAKER_00: I was encouraged to pursue graduate work because people said I had a talent for doing philosophy, but they said, Well, I don't know about Chinese philosophy.
18:13
SPEAKER_00: But then some of my Sinological mentors, people doing Chinese history or Chinese culture, said, Well, why would you want to do philosophy?
18:21
SPEAKER_00: That's a silly discipline.
18:22
SPEAKER_00: So ironically, from both sides, I was discouraged from doing it.
18:26
SPEAKER_00: But yeah, translation is one thing that's worth mentioning, there are, of course, interesting problems of translating from Chinese into English, but I'd like to point out there are plenty of good translations now available.
18:41
SPEAKER_00: We can always use more, and there are some understudied thinkers I'd like to see more translations of, but sometimes people use that as an excuse.
18:48
SPEAKER_00: They'll say, oh, well, I bet there are no translations.
18:51
SPEAKER_00: Well, I'm one of the co-editors and contributors to readings in classical Chinese philosophy, which is now in its third edition as a textbook.
19:00
SPEAKER_00: And I've I've also edited and contributed with uh my colleague Justin T.
19:04
SPEAKER_00: Wald to readings in later Chinese philosophy, which goes from the Han Dynasty up to the 20th century.
19:10
SPEAKER_00: And, you know, again, P.J.
19:11
SPEAKER_00: Ivanhoe and I did readings in classical Chinese philosophy, which includes these seminal early thinkers like Confucius, Lao Tzu, the supposed author of the Tao Ta Jing, and other movements that aren't as well known.
19:23
SPEAKER_01: And I was going to hold up another of yours, Hungzha.
19:26
SPEAKER_00: Oh, thank you.
19:27
SPEAKER_00: Yes, my Mengzi translation, yeah.
19:29
SPEAKER_01: With a wonderful translation and commentaries, fantastic.
19:34
SPEAKER_00: But this also brings out that you know, we need more doctoral programs to train people because we have a vicious circle where there are very few doctoral programs that can train students to be experts in Chinese philosophy.
19:48
SPEAKER_00: And then people say, well, it's so hard to hire someone.
19:51
SPEAKER_00: It's hard to hire someone because you don't train anybody, you know.
19:55
SPEAKER_01: And by the way, of course, uh, students should go to China to study.
20:00
SPEAKER_01: Sure.
20:00
SPEAKER_01: Uh, this would be one way to bring back a lot of knowledge and a lot of wisdom and a lot of uh linguistic uh skill as well.
20:08
SPEAKER_01: Even that seems to be challenged right now because of this general tension uh at the geopolitical level, which you and I both bemoan.
20:18
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
20:18
SPEAKER_01: Uh but it seems to be having its effect on the flow of students.
20:22
SPEAKER_00: I think that's right.
20:23
SPEAKER_00: And, you know, I have friends, I sometimes teach at Wuhan University in China, and they've done a very good job about, you know, bringing foreign students over when possible and being inviting to foreign students, so there are great opportunities there.
20:36
SPEAKER_00: And I don't know how much you want to go into this, but I I've been warning my students saying there are a lot of forces in the US that are pushing for a war with China.
20:47
SPEAKER_00: And there are people who, although that would be disastrous for both the United States and China, unimaginable, by the way.
20:55
SPEAKER_01: So horrible.
20:56
SPEAKER_01: It's really in the rhetoric and in the air.
21:00
SPEAKER_01: Absolutely, absolutely.
21:02
SPEAKER_00: I show my students videos of some of the clips from things that people are saying on talk shows now.
21:07
SPEAKER_00: You know, and we just saw with Senator Cotton cross-examining someone from Singapore acting like he doesn't know the difference between Singapore and China, or between being ethnically Chinese and being a member of the Chinese Communist Party.
21:23
SPEAKER_00: And this is part of a kind of a desire on the part of some people.
21:26
SPEAKER_00: I think really they want to have a race war.
21:28
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and even a member of the Chinese Communist Party.
21:32
SPEAKER_01: So what?
21:32
SPEAKER_01: So many of my former students are and because they are officials in the government.
21:38
SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
21:39
SPEAKER_01: That's the most natural thing in the world.
21:41
SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
21:41
SPEAKER_00: It's this weird Stalinistic view of what it would mean to be a Communist Party member.
21:46
SPEAKER_00: It means you're a government official, you know?
21:48
SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
21:49
SPEAKER_00: And these same people who are bemoaning it, if Tom Cotton lived in China, he would be a proud member of the Communist Party.
21:56
SPEAKER_00: No question.
21:57
SPEAKER_01: In uh your manifesto, you have a Wonderful chapter about what would actually happen with real dialogue between these traditions.
22:07
SPEAKER_01: And I wanted to ask you about that because you make some, I think, very important comparisons of Hobbes versus Menches, for example, among the and the similarities that Aristotle, I always think that Aristotle and Confucius would have a lot to talk about, because they both believe in virtue, they both believe in personal excellence, but then you describe, they of course have different perspectives on that, so it would be a pretty rich discussion as well.
22:35
SPEAKER_01: So can you uh walk us through what do we learn by putting Aristotle and Confucius on stage together, as it were, to help us understand their respective points of view and to shed some light on our cultures?
22:50
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, great question.
22:52
SPEAKER_00: When I first started studying Chinese philosophy at the doctoral level at Stanford, by the way, the Stanford Philosophy Department no longer has anybody who teaches Chinese philosophy.
23:02
SPEAKER_00: But that's where I did my doctoral work.
23:04
SPEAKER_00: And when I first started studying there, nobody thought there were interesting similarities between Confucians and Aristotelians.
23:11
SPEAKER_00: But one of my mentors, Lee H.
23:13
SPEAKER_00: Yearly, wrote a book, uh, Mencius and Aquinas: Theories of Virtue and Conceptions of Courage.
23:20
SPEAKER_00: And Mencius, that's another Jesuit Latinization of the name Mungza, who's sometimes called the second sage of Confucianism, meaning second in importance only to Confucius himself.
23:34
SPEAKER_00: And I often tell people if you want to start learning about Confucianism, a good place to start is reading the eponymous Mungza, M-E-N-G-Z-I, which I've I've translated, but other people also have some fine translations as well.
23:50
SPEAKER_00: And so what you what you find out is that Confucians like Confucius himself and Mungza and Aristotle and Plato, they disagree about a lot, but they're very concerned with what is the best way to live, what character traits are you going to need to live that kind of life, how do you cultivate those character traits, and what is human nature like such that it is possible for you to cultivate those traits and live that kind of life.
24:22
SPEAKER_00: And that's a distinctive way of formulating ethics, very different, for example, from the way Kant formulates ethics.
24:30
SPEAKER_01: I personally really like it.
24:33
SPEAKER_01: Kant is about rules and duty, but this is about character, and as the Greeks translated in Latin, I guess, also the virtues or excellences.
24:43
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
24:43
SPEAKER_01: The Greeks said erete for excellence, but it's an excellence of character.
24:48
SPEAKER_01: And then the question is, well, how do you get to be an excellent person?
24:52
SPEAKER_01: And that's really what Aristotle is trying to say in his ethics, and it's it's what Demungza or or Confucius is trying to teach in in that tradition.
25:02
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and and I find that as soon as students get a handle on what this is about, this is really exciting for them because they're like, well, this is what I thought philosophy was going to be about.
25:12
SPEAKER_00: How should I live and how can I get to be a better person?
25:15
SPEAKER_00: But you mentioned Hobbes.
25:17
SPEAKER_00: Correct me if I'm wrong, I think you and I have kind of a similar take on Hobbes.
25:21
SPEAKER_00: One line I sometimes use is I feel like Hobbes is the smartest, stupid guy I know.
25:28
SPEAKER_00: Because in his work Leviathan, he develops with ruthless consistency this worldview that's kind of seductive as long as you don't think about it too carefully.
25:41
SPEAKER_00: And it is representative of a way of thinking about human beings that's become dominant in the modern West, where Hobbes thinks about individuals as radically independent, almost like atoms, you know, that are just self-centered.
25:57
SPEAKER_00: And for Hobbes, you form a society just because life in the state of nature, it's not his phrase, but it becomes a common phrase later.
26:06
SPEAKER_00: The idea in this life in the state of nature is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
26:11
SPEAKER_00: And so we work together in society just because the alternative is that we're going to kill each other.
26:17
SPEAKER_00: But ultimately, you're just looking out for yourself and you only care about yourself, and that's your only real motive.
26:23
SPEAKER_00: But I think a much more realistic view is the view you get either from Confucians or Aristotelians.
26:29
SPEAKER_00: Aristotle famously says a line that's sometimes translated, man is by nature a political animal.
26:36
SPEAKER_00: I read Greek, and I think the Greek would be better rendered as humans are by nature social animals.
26:43
SPEAKER_00: And Confucians agree with that.
26:45
SPEAKER_00: We are born into a society.
26:48
SPEAKER_00: We are creatures that would not survive as an evolutionary fact unless we were members of a community that worked together.
26:56
SPEAKER_00: And we are born with obligations to other people, and other people because of the way in which we help them get obligations to us.
27:04
SPEAKER_00: And so we have to learn how to live together and to cooperate as a society.
27:10
SPEAKER_00: And I think at a fundamental level, I don't want to over-generalize because there's great diversity in both the Western and Eastern traditions, but I think there's a general way in which we tend to think of ourselves as self-actualizing separate individuals in the West who are competing for finite resources.
27:29
SPEAKER_00: And in many parts of Asia, they recognize that no, human beings are part of a larger whole, and we're only going to survive if we learn to work together for common goals and see the common humanity in each other.
27:42
SPEAKER_01: And, you know, I, of course, trained in economics, and the way that Hobbes got translated into economics is that by the time I studied in the middle of the 20th century, a little bit after the middle, let's say, so I'm not that old, but whatever, uh, it the idea was you have your preferences, they're given, and they're yours, and they're basically egoistic.
28:07
SPEAKER_01: But two things wrong with it uh fundamentally, and they're interrelated, uh, and they're uh related to this conversation.
28:16
SPEAKER_01: One is that uh, of course, uh egoism is assumed that you're out for yourself, but the other is whatever you want, it's just given.
28:27
SPEAKER_01: There's no idea of cultivating your character or improving your character.
28:32
SPEAKER_01: So you are what you are, and that's Hobbes.
28:35
SPEAKER_01: For Hobbes, you're not only egoistic, but it's insatiable, it's implacable.
28:41
SPEAKER_01: You'll kill each other over this.
28:42
SPEAKER_01: You won't think twice about it because you can't help yourself.
28:46
SPEAKER_01: You're just like you say, a billiard ball colliding with other billiard balls.
28:51
SPEAKER_01: You don't like them, you don't eat, but you don't even have an internal reflection.
28:56
SPEAKER_01: Whereas uh Mengze or Confucius or Aristotle or Plato or Socrates is saying, reflect on it, think about it, you can be a better person.
29:06
SPEAKER_01: And that cultivation is a common feature, it seems to me, of these virtue ethicists.
29:13
SPEAKER_00: I think that's exactly right.
29:15
SPEAKER_00: And to me, uh one book that was really helpful was Alistair McIntyre's book After Virtue.
29:21
SPEAKER_00: And one of the things McIntyre points out, I thought this was very insightful, he said that with the rise of modern science, one of the things that early modern science rejected was the Aristotelian notion of potentials, which then achieve actuality.
29:38
SPEAKER_00: And so the notion of explaining things in terms of potential was mocked in terms of like a virtuormativa explanation.
29:46
SPEAKER_00: It's like trying to explain why opium puts you to sleep.
29:48
SPEAKER_00: Oh, because it has a virtuormativa, it has a sleep-inducing power.
29:52
SPEAKER_00: Well, that explains nothing.
29:54
SPEAKER_00: And the rejection of Aristotelian potentials, at least at the beginning of modern science, was very productive.
30:01
SPEAKER_00: But at the same time, people rejected the notion of having a potential which can be actualized as a feature of human character.
30:09
SPEAKER_00: And so part of the weird genius of Hobbes was to think: well, if you have a political philosophy where your motivations are basically fixed, you can't transform yourself.
30:21
SPEAKER_00: And, you know, most people are kind of selfish to start out with anyway.
30:25
SPEAKER_00: So if you can't change that, what would the political implications be?
30:29
SPEAKER_00: That's what Hobbes was developing in the Leviathan.
30:31
SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
30:32
SPEAKER_01: And we're taught in the first day the tastes are what they are, and don't ask questions about them.
30:38
SPEAKER_01: It's amazing.
30:39
SPEAKER_01: That's actually the first day of economics.
30:41
SPEAKER_01: Is uh you have individuals, they have their preferences, you're not to question that, and now let's move on.
30:47
SPEAKER_01: So it's Hobbesian, although by the time Adam Smith got to it, instead of a Leviathan, he said a world market economy would uh would be the uh solvent in in which these uh individual interests would operate.
31:02
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and it's it's so strange because you think about it, we realize we can get better and we can change at so many things.
31:10
SPEAKER_00: You can get better at playing tennis, you can be get better at being a connoisseur of appreciating wines, you can get better at playing poker, one of my favorite examples.
31:20
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I want to come back to that, by the way.
31:22
SPEAKER_00: There are all these things that we know with practice and learning we can get better at.
31:28
SPEAKER_00: So why not get better at being a person?
31:31
SPEAKER_00: Why can't we get better at that?
31:32
SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
31:33
SPEAKER_01: Now, uh let me uh move on in in the book because there are two more parts that I think are absolutely wonderful that I want to ask you about.
31:41
SPEAKER_01: One is your take on Marco Rubio who says we need more welders and less philosophers, and he misstates the actual situation of the marketplace because you point out a lot of philosophy majors go on to become top business people, politicians, and so forth.
31:57
SPEAKER_01: So it's exactly.
31:59
SPEAKER_01: Uh so I wanted to ask you about uh what you call the practical benefits of philosophy.
32:04
SPEAKER_01: Uh and then uh at it towards the end, you ask a basic question, which I think our listeners would love to hear.
32:12
SPEAKER_01: So, what is a philosopher?
32:14
SPEAKER_01: What do philosophers actually do?
32:16
SPEAKER_01: So tell me about welders and philosophy.
32:19
SPEAKER_00: Right.
32:19
SPEAKER_00: So in that chapter, part of what I point out is that uh in fact, philosophy majors go on to a wide variety of careers, and my students have.
32:28
SPEAKER_00: I sometimes tell my students when they're trying to decide what to major in, I say, Well, look, what you majored in is going to be interesting first date conversation five years from now, and that's about it.
32:42
SPEAKER_00: So don't worry what you major in.
32:44
SPEAKER_00: There are a lot of things, major in what interests you.
32:46
SPEAKER_00: But in fact, philosophy is very good at teaching what I sometimes call the three R's of a liberal arts education: reading, writing, and reasoning.
32:56
SPEAKER_00: And so uh, because uh what you get by studying philosophical text is skill at reading, challenging works carefully and not having a superficial reading, writing with precision and care and clarity, and reasoning your way through complex problems, all of which are extremely valuable tools in any career you pick.
33:20
SPEAKER_00: And that's why, as I say, philosophy majors go on to a variety of different careers.
33:26
SPEAKER_00: And among the people who've talked about the value of philosophy are figures as diverse as Admiral James Stockdale, who said that studying philosophy helped him to survive being a prisoner of war in the Vietnam conflict, you know, surviving that experience, and Martin Luther King Jr., who said that next to the Bible, the most meaningful work to him was Plato's Republic, and the ideas of Plato reverberate through his work.
33:54
SPEAKER_00: Interestingly, Malcolm X, I only discovered recently, also was a huge fan of Plato.
34:01
SPEAKER_00: And he said that his school system failed to teach him how to read, but he learned to read by getting a copy of a translation of Plato's Republic out of a local library and just reading it until he became the very eloquent spokesperson that he eventually became.
34:17
SPEAKER_01: I, by the way, I came to uh adore Plato more and more, although I consider myself more an Aristotelian uh than a Platonic follower.
34:26
SPEAKER_01: But one nice thing for me about Plato is that, like many philosophers, and this is something that is not so well understood, he was very practical, uh interested in very practical issues.
34:39
SPEAKER_01: Really, what should the laws be?
34:41
SPEAKER_01: But he wanted to apply them just like Confucius did.
34:44
SPEAKER_01: Confucius was talking to policymakers, and he wanted to affect the policy of the kingdoms of his time.
34:52
SPEAKER_01: And Plato went to Syracusa in Sicily on three occasions, it said, to try to advise the rulers.
35:01
SPEAKER_01: He failed all three times.
35:03
SPEAKER_01: One of the times he was imprisoned and then had to escape from what would have been forced slavery.
35:10
SPEAKER_01: But I rather like the fact that Plato was a failed advisor, because uh, as an advisor myself, if Plato can fail, it kind of gives you a license to, you're not always going to succeed in this business.
35:22
SPEAKER_01: So I found that very human for one thing.
35:26
SPEAKER_01: But also, it's really true that so many of the philosophers, not Kant, who really was a thinker in Konigsburg and never left and uh you know operated by the daily schedule with precision.
35:41
SPEAKER_01: It was said you could set your uh clock by the time that uh Kant walked by in the afternoon.
35:47
SPEAKER_01: But the other philosophers, so many of them, were very down-to-earth, practical, would-be politicians, saying, can't we do better?
35:56
SPEAKER_01: Uh can't the world be uh you know a little bit smarter than killing each other?
36:00
SPEAKER_01: Uh and so they're really trying to appeal to the people in power to think better so that we actually get some better outcomes.
36:09
SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
36:09
SPEAKER_00: And occasionally uh people will give me a hard time and say, Well, why do you have to keep bringing politics into the discussion of philosophy?
36:17
SPEAKER_00: And I said, philosophy's always been political.
36:20
SPEAKER_00: Socrates was executed as a result of a show trial, which was deeply connected with the politics in Athens at the time.
36:28
SPEAKER_00: And as you point out, Plato was deeply involved in politics and was trying to effect practical change.
36:34
SPEAKER_00: So were Confucius and Mungza, the second sage of Confucianism.
36:39
SPEAKER_00: They were very involved in practical political activities.
36:42
SPEAKER_01: One can add that Aristotle, of course, was the tutor of Alexander the Great.
36:47
SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
36:48
SPEAKER_01: And also had to flee Athens in 323 BC when Alexander died.
36:54
SPEAKER_01: Aristotle was uh a Macedonian in Greek Athens and said, I'm not going to let Athens commit a second crime against philosophy.
37:03
SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
37:04
SPEAKER_01: And he left in his last year and then died the following year.
37:07
SPEAKER_01: But very political.
37:09
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, just to interject, a fun book, like a kind of not a scholarly book, but a fun book that I think a lot of people would enjoy, is The Murder of Professor Schlicht, which is about a member of the Vienna Circle who was assassinated by one of his students.
37:25
SPEAKER_00: And the student got a very light sentence because he said, and pardon my language, but this is the case he made at his trial.
37:32
SPEAKER_00: The student said, My mind was destroyed by the Jewish philosophy that this professor was teaching me.
37:38
SPEAKER_00: And this professor was part of the Vienna Circle.
37:41
SPEAKER_00: And I learned about the Vienna Circle as an extremely abstract epistemological movement.
37:48
SPEAKER_01: Right.
37:48
SPEAKER_01: Very pure, the positivism and uh exactly.
37:52
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, which it was, but I learned from this book that the logical positivists were very political, and they saw their project as an effort to combat fascism by finding foundations for knowledge and showing that fascist movements were not based on real science.
38:10
SPEAKER_00: And I was never taught that in graduate school, how political the Vienna Circle was.
38:15
SPEAKER_01: That is uh fascinating.
38:16
SPEAKER_01: And it comes to the final and wonderful chapter of this book, which is What is Philosophy?
38:22
SPEAKER_01: You call it the Way of Confucius and Socrates.
38:25
SPEAKER_01: And I want to quote your definition in the end, which is dialogue over important unsolved problems.
38:33
SPEAKER_01: I love that, uh, by the way.
38:36
SPEAKER_01: I think one of the points that I have come to feel reading a lot of philosophy uh later in my career is philosophers are trying to solve really hard problems that science has not given an answer to.
38:53
SPEAKER_01: So there's no rigorous answer.
38:55
SPEAKER_01: And so you can look back and say, well, why did they believe this and that?
38:59
SPEAKER_01: But what they were trying to do was to posit solutions to very important issues that need practical solutions, but where there isn't an off-the-shelf answer to these questions.
39:13
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, exactly.
39:14
SPEAKER_00: And uh, I mean, I think uh people sometimes forget that all of natural science grows out of philosophy.
39:23
SPEAKER_00: But then when we figure out the right methodology for doing, say, physics or chemistry, it spins off as a separate field.
39:31
SPEAKER_00: And then what's left in philosophy are the problems that we consider important, but we don't agree on the methodology for resolving them, so the best we can do is engage in a productive, mutually respective dialogue.
39:43
SPEAKER_01: And you point out, and I think it's it fits exactly that, and it's uh very important.
39:49
SPEAKER_01: When the normal science breaks down what we call a paradigm change, according to Thomas Kuhn, and there's a new emergence of science, immediately the scientists become philosophers again.
40:03
SPEAKER_01: They have to, because suddenly they're grappling with something that, again, they just can't categorize in an old language, and they're grasping for a set of principles and organization that doesn't yet exist, and that's philosophy in its way.
40:20
SPEAKER_01: It's a very hard challenge.
40:22
SPEAKER_00: That's exactly right.
40:24
SPEAKER_00: And the fact is that if you look at great scientists like Einstein, Einstein said that he thought physicists should learn philosophy if they want to be great physicists.
40:34
SPEAKER_00: And Einstein said he was indebted to Hume because reading Hume had given Einstein the insights that he needed to formulate general relativity.
40:43
SPEAKER_00: Dalton referred back to the ancient Greek atomists in developing the basis of modern chemistry.
40:49
SPEAKER_00: Galileo was open about the fact that he was inspired by Plato and Plato's model in the Timaeus that through the mathematization of the universe, it's that we that's the way in which we find the key to understanding physical phenomena.
41:02
SPEAKER_00: And I think it's unfortunate that there's a trend, and in some ways, I think this goes back to Richard Feynman, who was a great physicist and a real character as a person, so people often kind of liked him.
41:14
SPEAKER_00: But he was a real Philistine when it came to philosophy.
41:17
SPEAKER_00: And I think too many American scientists, that's their role model, the kind of like dismissal of the humanities and the dismissal of philosophy that you find in Feynman, but you don't find in the really great physicists like Heisenberg and Einstein, who are very clear, or Bohr, Niels Bohr, who was very influenced by Taoist thought and has the yin yang symbol on his coat of arms, Niels Bohr, one of the founders of quantum mechanics.
41:46
SPEAKER_01: And of course, we've all learned this year about Oppenheimer and his attraction to uh Bhagavad Gita and uh Eastern philosophy.
41:55
SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
41:55
SPEAKER_01: Now I I need to get to the bottom line with you.
41:58
SPEAKER_01: If if I'm correct, you are a champion poker player.
42:02
SPEAKER_01: Uh so uh is that correct, by the way?
42:04
SPEAKER_00: I I'm a winning poker player, let's put it that way.
42:06
SPEAKER_00: So I'm I keep very careful methods from a long-term winning poker player, yes.
42:11
SPEAKER_01: Wow.
42:12
SPEAKER_01: Now, what is the relationship of philosophy and poker if there is one?
42:17
SPEAKER_01: And I ask seriously, because poker is not a game of building relations with the other.
42:22
SPEAKER_01: It's a game of deception, of bluff.
42:25
SPEAKER_01: Of course, you need a theory of mind of the other, but uh how do you see as a master philosopher and a master poker player, what is the relationship between them?
42:37
SPEAKER_00: I think one of the things you learn, again, it's an interesting similarity between the Aristotelian and the Confucian traditions, is that true wisdom is not reducible to rule following.
42:48
SPEAKER_00: So there are mathematical principles and rules in poker that are important, but you're not going to be a winning player, at least not in say no-limit hold'em, if you just try to follow mathematical rules.
43:02
SPEAKER_00: You have to learn a kind of wisdom that goes beyond simple rule following in order to be a success.
43:09
SPEAKER_00: And that involves things like having a good read of the character of others, uh, a good situational awareness, how is this different from other situations I've been in?
43:19
SPEAKER_00: And so, even things that might seem like absolute rules, there are always going to be exceptions to them.
43:24
SPEAKER_00: And for me, that's a real insight that both Confucius and Aristotle had.
43:28
SPEAKER_01: Well, I think your poker success as well as your intellectual, not only success, but the compelling manifesto is going to bring a lot of people to philosophy.
43:39
SPEAKER_01: I can't tell you how grateful I am, Brian, to you for opening up a whole new world for me in understanding.
43:47
SPEAKER_01: And of course, we have the joy, I have the joy to be working with you on our Aristotle Confucius Symposium, which will have its third edition this year in Confucius's birthplace.
44:00
SPEAKER_01: Place to Shufu, Shangdong Province this summer.
44:03
SPEAKER_01: So that is absolutely wonderful.
44:06
SPEAKER_01: Now, people listening are going to say, what do I do next?
44:10
SPEAKER_01: How do I uh get involved?
44:11
SPEAKER_01: How do I learn?
44:13
SPEAKER_01: Of course, they should get the manifesto, but alongside it, my recommendation would be to uh get your introduction to classical Chinese philosophy.
44:23
SPEAKER_01: Is that a good way to start?
44:25
SPEAKER_00: I think so, yes.
44:26
SPEAKER_00: So this is uh my introduction to classical Chinese philosophy is written for uh beginning undergraduate students, so it does not assume a lot of background.
44:35
SPEAKER_00: And then as I say, if you want to read some more, PJ Ivanhoe and I have edited readings in classical Chinese philosophy.
44:42
SPEAKER_00: Justin Twald and I have edited readings in later Chinese philosophy, both available from Hackett Publishing.
44:48
SPEAKER_00: And so those are good places to learn more and get a sense of the great richness of this tradition.
44:54
SPEAKER_01: And you have made a long reading list alongside the manifesto, is that right?
44:59
SPEAKER_00: Oh, yes, thank you.
44:59
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, on my website, BrianvanNorden.com, B-R-Y-A-N-V-A-N-N-O-R-D-E-N.com, I've got a bibliography which has readings on not just East Asian philosophy, but South Asian philosophy, Africana philosophy, and indigenous American philosophy, along with sample syllabi, reading lists, and other things people can use to self-teach.
45:24
SPEAKER_00: And also teachers who would like to incorporate this into their undergraduate courses, I'd be honored to have them use my syllabi and handouts and things.
45:33
SPEAKER_01: Well, we're going to post all of this information.
45:36
SPEAKER_01: We'll post the titles, the links, the links to your website.
45:40
SPEAKER_01: I am absolutely sure many, many listeners will get involved and become interested in, I'm sure, deeply attracted to new thinkers that they have not studied before, and all of the wisdom and the richness of really bridging cultures, which is something uh of unbelievable importance in a world today that is so fraught with tension.
46:06
SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
46:06
SPEAKER_01: But where so much richness comes from appreciating the diversity and benefiting from the diversity.
46:13
SPEAKER_01: So I really thank you for that.
46:16
SPEAKER_01: To my mind, your approach is not only intellectually inspiring, but it is also very much peacemaking because it's finding a way for a word you use often, dialogue.
46:28
SPEAKER_01: And I think dialogue is the essence of mutual respect and cooperation.
46:34
SPEAKER_01: So let me thank you, Brian, for uh your wonderful work.
46:38
SPEAKER_01: Thank you for joining Book Club today.
46:41
SPEAKER_01: Thank you for this dialogue, which is for me an ongoing uh dialogue with you and a dialogue that you're opening up with these rich traditions.
46:51
SPEAKER_01: To all the listeners, thank you for joining Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs.
46:55
SPEAKER_01: We've been with Brian Van Norden, Professor Vasser, Taking Back Philosophy, a multicultural manifesto.
47:04
SPEAKER_01: Thanks so much for joining in today.
47:06
SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much for all that you've done, Jeff.
47:08
SPEAKER_00: I appreciate it.
47:09
SPEAKER_01: Great to be with you.
47:13
SPEAKER_01: Thank you for joining in the conversation.
47:15
SPEAKER_01: Please subscribe, rate, and write a review on whatever platform you listen for your podcast.