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The first half of this interview is dedicated to Baruch Spinoza and his advice on how to lead a meaningful life. In the second part, Steven Nadler tells us about his passion for philosophy, shares his favourite books on the subject, and tells us why he thinks philosophy needs to be taught in schools along with maths, literature, and physics.
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The first half of this interview is dedicated to Baruch Spinoza and his advice on how to lead a meaningful life. In the second part, Steven Nadler tells us about his passion for philosophy, shares his favourite books on the subject, and tells us why he thinks philosophy needs to be taught in schools along with maths, literature, and physics.
Listen to How Can Spinoza Change Your Life - Professor Steven Nadler by Vashik Armenikus MP3 song. How Can Spinoza Change Your Life - Professor Steven Nadler song from Vashik Armenikus is available on Audio.com. The duration of song is 55:48. This high-quality MP3 track has 260.51 kbps bitrate and was uploaded on 7 Jun 2023. Stream and download How Can Spinoza Change Your Life - Professor Steven Nadler by Vashik Armenikus for free on Audio.com – your ultimate destination for MP3 music.
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Spinoza's philosophy encourages thoughtful reflection on one's actions and life. He believed that philosophy makes us more self-aware and reflective. Stephen Nadler, author of "Think Least of Death," discusses Spinoza's ideas on leading a meaningful life. Spinoza abandoned his family's business to pursue philosophy and was excommunicated from his community. Spinoza's ideas on free will and determinism suggest that while everything is determined, we still have the capacity to make choices based on our own desires and beliefs. Spinoza emphasizes the importance of being vigilant and actively questioning our beliefs, especially in a world filled with external influences. He believes that all individuals have the potential for rational thinking, but external factors and circumstances may limit this capacity. Spinoza sees humans as part of nature and subject to its laws. While we have unique intellectual capacities, he doesn't view humans as superior or special. Rather, he emphasizes the res What doing philosophy brings you to doing is always being thoughtful about your particular actions and about the life you're leading. I think if doing philosophy does anything, it's that. It makes you into a more reflective and self-aware person. Now once Spinoza gets a hold of you, he doesn't let go. It's easy to become obsessed with Spinoza because it's so fascinatingly difficult and so difficultly fascinating that you constantly go back to Spinoza to try to understand him better. And so much of what I've written has been my attempt to both try to get to know Spinoza, his thought and his life better, and also try to help other people understand him. He would look at American politics today and the way in which a certain political party is violating the norms of democracy and the way in which it's being influenced by religion, and he would say, that is exactly what I warned you about. That is precisely what I was worried about happening in the Dutch Republic, and now I see you should be very concerned yourselves about how it's happening now. Hello friends, welcome to Artidote's podcast, where I, Pasi Karmelikas, ask questions to best-selling non-fiction authors about their books and ideas. I'm excited about this episode because this episode's guest is Stephen Nadler. He's a professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and he's author of a book called Think Least of Death, which focuses on the 17th century Dutch-Jewish philosopher Aruk Spinoza. This book is one of my favorite reads of this year. One of the reasons why I love this book so much is because Spinoza's ideas can teach us how to lead a meaningful life. Some studies showed that since the pandemic, many employees decided to quit their jobs to pursue something more meaningful. The economists, in their usual manner, decided to give a name to this social cataclysm, and they called it the Great Resignation. But let's admit it, it's not entirely surprising that many of us started to question our priorities in life after being hit by such a shocking event. Professor Nadler's book shows that our pursuit to find meaning is an everlasting desire, and Spinoza was no exception. The young Spinoza abandoned his family's business to dedicate his life to philosophy. He quickly became notorious across Europe for his views on God, the Bible, and miracles, as well as for his uncompromising defense of free thought. In 1656, Spinoza was excommunicated from Amsterdam's Portuguese Jewish community for "'abominable heresies' and "'monstrous deeds'." Yet his radical ideas tried to answer our life's most urgent questions, such as how to lead a good life, how to lead a life of reason, what is happiness, and how to achieve it. In this episode, I asked Professor Nadler about Spinoza's key ideas, and how we can apply them to our lives to live more meaningfully. I've also asked him about his own journey into the world of philosophy. How did he discover Spinoza? What influence did Spinoza's ideas have on his life? And what are his favorite books on philosophy in general? I hope you'll enjoy listening to this episode with Professor Nadler. Professor Nadler, thank you so much for coming to my podcast. It's such an honor. I really enjoyed reading your book, Think List of Death, about Spinoza. I've recently read one piece, and it said that many people in our post-pandemic world suddenly realized that their jobs were meaningless, that what they were doing wasn't exciting, and they were just wasting their time in life. And I kind of made that connection with what you describe about Spinoza's life. In the beginning of your book, you tell that he decided to choose, let's say, not to go through a regular route in his life, but he decided to pursue philosophy. So my first question for us would be, what did it make Spinoza to choose life of philosophy, of contemplation, of understanding what's the essence of life? Is there, do you see any connection between what we're looking for right now and what Spinoza was trying to do? Yes, absolutely. I think it's a perennial question that any sufficiently reflective person will ask about their life. Are the projects I'm engaged in, are the things I value, are they all truly worthwhile, or am I just going through the motions? And it's interesting that the very first exit writing we have from Spinoza in the first few paragraphs of it, we have perhaps one of the very only autobiographical remarks he makes about this turn in his life. He was in Amsterdam having taken over from his father's business, and he is not feeling that satisfaction that should come if you think your life is on the right course. So I think it's very much the kind of thing that any person who gives sufficient attention to what they're doing and reflects on it at the second order. I mean, sometimes we're so deeply enmeshed in our projects, we don't take the opportunity to think about why we're doing what we're doing. But what Spinoza went through at that point in his life, I think, is a very familiar thing that so many of us go through, and that, like Spinoza, caused us to not just question what we're doing and look for change, but turn to the kind of project that philosophy is, namely seeking out the answers to certain questions about the meaning of life, what's truth, what's good, what's a good life. What makes people being so absorbed in this kind of inert lifestyle that only something like pandemic can shake them up and say, like, hold on, is this exactly what you want to do? What would Spinoza's response would be in this case? Well, your use of the word inert there, I think, is important. It's a kind of inertia that a body in motion will continue in motion unless stopped by or affected by some external force. And I think the same thing, especially given Spinoza's picture of the deterministic universe, a mind in motion that is on a certain train of thoughts will continue in that train of thoughts unless something interrupts it. And so it does take, I suppose, in most cases, and especially for determinists like Spinoza, it takes some event or some interruption to get us out of that automatic inertia, that mindset in which we just keep going on doing what we're doing. I think it'd be very rare for this kind of reflective search to occur spontaneously. And we know that for Spinoza, there are no purely spontaneous events. So in his case, and I think this is probably true in many of these cases, what moved him to this change is a feeling of dissatisfaction, a sense that there's something better, something more meaningful and satisfying in this life. So it's not a spontaneous change of mind. It was brought about by what Spinoza calls an affective feeling. I shared your book in my newsletter. And one of the questions that I've received was, people were asking, since Spinoza's world is deterministic, and at the same time, he talks about us being free, I think people were curious about this dichotomy of everything being predetermined. So essentially, does it mean that COVID was predetermined? So as the cause, it was predetermined that people will question their life choices, or how does it exactly work in Spinoza's world? I think it's not quite right to call it predetermined, because that suggests it's a kind of providential plan, that things have been set up in advance to reach a certain end. It is determined. And so given the series of antecedent causes, the thing that happens will necessarily happen. And it's not predetermination, because there's nobody setting it up so that it will come out in a certain way. And had been the series of antecedent causes different, then the outcome would have been different. Where freedom comes in is, and I think here Spinoza is probably right, that despite the fact that everything is causally determined, even our states of mind, and that will include our volitions and choices and decisions. It all depends upon what's doing the determining. If my volitions or choices are determined or constrained by things outside of me, in a way forcing me to make the choices I do, then I'm certainly not free. On the other hand, if my choices and decisions are determined by something about me, let's say, my choice for a vanilla ice cream cone is determined by my belief that vanilla is the best flavor of ice cream, plus my desire for an ice cream cone based upon my sensation of hunger, then I will order a vanilla ice cream cone. But why should we say that that's not a free choice? It's a choice I'm making. And nothing is forcing me to do it. Nothing is forcing me to do it, and if nothing is keeping me from doing it, I will do it. And so in this sense, Spinoza is what philosophers call a compatibilist about free will. He doesn't think in order to be free that you have to have been capable of doing otherwise, all things being the same. So, you know, given the series of antecedent events or factors, I will choose vanilla and not chocolate. It doesn't mean that my choice of vanilla to be free, I must have just as been able to eat, to choose chocolate. That's the kind of freedom that Spinoza rejects. But if my choice of vanilla is a reflection of what I want to do, then that's what freedom is. It is particularly relevant, this idea is particularly relevant today when we are, there is so much influences on our decisions in our lives right now from social media, advertisements, so much media around us that kind of tries to force us to make certain decisions. What would Spinoza's advice would be in this situation? How can we be autonomous people under so much influence? Well, one of the classic objections to compatibilism is that even if the determining factors of your choices come from within you, aren't those factors within you ultimately determined by things outside of you? What you read, what you've been taught, who you're friends with, who you listen to, what TV shows you watch and so on. Spinoza's response to that would be, well, you have the capacity to be in control of how those things affect you. So I suspect that his answer would be that the free person will exercise a good deal of vigilance on what does and what does not affect them in certain ways. In fact, his definition of the free person involves the kind of self-control and the capacity not to let external things determine him or herself, but to be in control of their reactions to these things. So, yes, let's say you always watch Fox News or you always read certain newspapers. You never lose, in theory, the capacity to be critically responsive to those. If you're merely a passive receptor of this information, then you're not free in any sense, not Spinoza's sense or anybody else's sense. But because we are rational beings who are capable of weighing evidence and making our judgments on the basis of that evidence and either maintaining or giving up our judgments or choices or beliefs on the basis of whether the evidence supports or just confirms them, then as many and as different as these external factors are, we still maintain that kind of autonomy and rationality and, I think as Kant would say, our human dignity. Well, as a person who also watches news, reads newspapers, I tend to think, I hope that I'm vigilant in what I consume and in my decisions. But is there a way for me to be sure that I'm not just convincing myself that I'm vigilant, that I have critical thinking, that I weigh up facts? Is there a way of, in the case of Spinoza, like in his ideas, for me to identify whether I'm just an inert person who just read the Guardian article and decided that I've made my own conclusions? So Spinoza seems, to me at least, generally uninterested in these sorts of epistemological questions, questions raised by skepticism. For example, in the way in which Descartes is very concerned with them. I mean, the meditations is his response to such epistemological questions. Spinoza, in a way, simply says, look, the rational person knows when they're being rational. True beliefs wear their truth and their adequacy on the face of it. A person who pays sufficient attention to their states of mind knows when their beliefs are adequate and knows when they're not. That said, I think that as well, any rational person knows what it takes to come to the conclusion that their beliefs either are or are not justified. We have, you know, we have very good cannons of logic and rational thinking so that we can determine how much evidence is necessary to support this belief, how much evidence will disconfirm that belief. And to the extent that you can stay in control of that process of living what Socrates called an examined life, I think you're not so much in danger of mistaking yourself and mistaking whether you are correct to believe what you believe. So as long as I kind of question myself and ask myself like the questions such as, are my beliefs justified? Have I overlooked something that kind of makes me rational in terms of like I'm constantly searching for truth rather than being in areas that correct my interpretation? Yeah, I would say you have to be very active in this. It's not simply a matter of waiting to see whether your beliefs are disconfirmed, but of actively testing them against new evidence, new situations. You have to be, you know, this is what scientists do, right? If they have a theory and it's not yet been disconfirmed, they keep seeking out new crucial experiments to see if these disconfirm the theory and then if the theory survives, so far so good. In a way, we need to apply the methods of science to even our most ordinary beliefs in politics, in our social lives, in ethics, and so on. And it has to be an active project, not a passive one. Are there different kinds of people? Like does Spinoza say that we have all equal capacity to rational thinking, like everyone is kind of born with it? Or does it vary from person to person? Is someone who has a scientific mind, who questions, who's like working at the universities and tries to question the world, is that person more critical in his way of thinking? Like in contrast, let's say, to me, who is more, let's say, artistic? I think in principle, he would say that everybody is equally endowed with the capacity to be rational and be a free person. And at the same time, I think it would be folly for him to deny, and I don't think he does deny, that given our different circumstances, some people will have more and other people have fewer opportunities to exercise that reason. It matters what educational opportunities you've had. It matters what your socioeconomic situation is. If you're living in poverty, your opportunities for engaging in philosophical inquiry are going to be less than if you have a certain degree of leisure in your life. And then he would also not deny that nature itself has endowed certain people with certain benefits when it comes to their rationality. Other people, perhaps by the unfortunate outcome of disabilities, may not be able to exercise those faculties. So, but in principle, yes, all human beings, by nature of being human beings, are rational, potentially, they're rational beings in principle, and hopefully will live in material conditions which allow them to exercise that rationality to the highest degree. And nature was very specific for Spinoza. He went away from God and theological views and focused on nature. What was his, what is nature for Spinoza? Nature is what there is. So, there is only one thing, nature, or God, or substance. I think the three terms for Spinoza are interchangeable, God, nature, substance. And what they refer to is the single, infinite, eternal, necessarily existing system of things. And then all other things, like human beings and giraffes, dogs and cats and trees, these are in nature and are subject to the necessity of nature's causal processes. So, everything happens in nature through the necessity of nature's laws. There's nothing outside of nature. There's no supernatural because nature is eternal and infinite. There's nothing outside of it. And so, all references to God that depicts God as a kind of personal agent and an anthropomorphic being who exercises providence, these are superstitious fictions. All there is, is God or nature or substance. And everything that happens, happens necessarily in and through God or nature or substance. When you were saying about nature, I felt as if you distinguished between nature, as you described God or substance, and you listed animals and us, humans. So, are we separate, kind of, from that vision of nature? Nature is something that influences, let's say, us humans? Are we, kind of, part of nature? Well, Spinoza explicitly says we are necessarily a part of nature. And so are giraffes, dogs, cats and trees. We are all a part of nature. There's nothing special about human beings in that respect. So, again, we have an interesting difference between Spinoza and his philosophical mentor, in some respects, Descartes. Descartes thought that human beings are special, that we are the only items in nature that are more than just material bodies. We have souls. And the human soul, for Descartes, is not subject to the deterministic laws that govern the rest of nature. Spinoza rejects that. We are, both in our minds and our bodies, as much a part of nature as anything else, and so subject to all nature's processes. So, I mean, you could say that the word nature is equivocal for Spinoza. On the one hand, it could mean the all of everything, what there is. Or you can think of nature in our more colloquial sense, namely the things that are around us. You know, the space we inhabit, the trees we walk under, the ground we walk on, the sky we look at, the sun that warms us, and so on. But in either case, we're part of nature. What is your opinion, your personal opinion, in terms of this difference between Descartes and Spinoza and Descartes saying that there is a soul, therefore we are special. But if we exclude soul, any supernatural thing that we haven't proven, we have no scientific evidence, just our ability to question, have a conversation like this, question meaning, what direction does our life go and, like, discuss Spinoza. Does this, in your opinion, make humans special in the universe in some sense? Or do you think that Spinoza was right? I think we are both the same and different. We are products of nature. We come from nature and we return to nature. And we are subject to nature's laws just like anything else. So in that sense, we are no different from anything else in nature. On the other hand, of course, we're very different because we have this higher intellectual and rational capacity which allows us to invent very sophisticated things and create cities and art and literature and philosophy and send rocket ships into space and so on. So in that sense, we are different. Are we special? I'm not sure I would use that word only because special has a kind of normative sense. It doesn't make us better. In fact, it saddles us, I think, with a great deal of responsibility, a responsibility that we are failing to meet, you know, insofar as our sense of our own specialness is leading us to destroy other species and threaten catastrophe on the planet. So if by special you mean are we somehow the pinnacle of creation? Well, absolutely not. And Spinoza doesn't think there's such a thing as creation anyway. I guess it was a slightly poor choice of words on my behalf. By special, I meant more different in a sense. Maybe unique would be like, you know, special implies superiority while uniqueness is a bit different. Does Spinoza address this? You said that we can practice philosophy, send rockets to space. Does he address this uniqueness of ours, just our ability to do this kind of thing? In a way, he would deny it's unique in the sense that there's a qualitative difference between human beings and other individuals in nature. Nature for him is a continuum, and it's a continuum of complexity. And so there are very simple bodies in nature. Let's say a carrot is quite a simple body. There are more complex bodies, the body of a giraffe or of a gorilla. And then perhaps the human body is the most complex body of all, given our nervous system and our brain. But he also believes that there is nothing in nature, there are no individuals in nature that are merely bodies. This is another difference with Descartes. Every individual in nature is both a body and a mind. That is, there's a thought or thinking component to every individual nature. So the carrot's mind, as a reflection of the carrot body, will be a very simple mind. It's not going to have complex ideas. The gorilla body is much more complex, approaching the complexity of the human body. And so the gorilla mind will be more sophisticated than the carrot mind, but perhaps less sophisticated, but certainly less sophisticated than the human mind. And the human mind, as a reflection of the greatest complexity of the human body, will be more complex in its thinking than the gorilla mind. But it's a continuum. Degrees here are quantitative, not qualitative. There are no leaps in nature for Spinoza. I've noticed that there are a lot of echoes in Spinoza's thinking from Stoics. And when you've listed certain books that he had in his library in your book, some of them were by the Stoics. What was the influence of Stoicism and Stoic philosophers on Spinoza's thinking? Well, it's hard to read Spinoza's ethics and not be struck by how Stoic it seems, especially in parts three and four, where Spinoza tells us that there are differences. Spinoza does not think we can eliminate the passions, the passive affects we feel as we're affected by things around us, nor does he think it would be desirable to do so. But our challenge is to control our passions, our emotional feelings, rather than have them control us. And that's a very Stoic element. The other thing is that the key to controlling those passions is to come to a clear vision of the necessity of all things. And when you understand the necessity of nature and how everything is caused and determined and how so much of what happens to you and to the things you care about is beyond your control, the recognition of this necessity will bring a quieting of the emotions. There's a very poetic moment in the Ethics where he says that ordinarily, as we live our life, according to our passions, we're tossed about like waves on the sea. But to the extent that you can come to recognize the necessity of all things and that if you lose something you love, that was not due to anything you could have done or you could have prevented, but it's just the necessity of nature. If a loved one dies from a disease, if you recognize the necessity of it and that there was nothing you could have done in the end to prevent it, Spinoza believes that your sadness and your regret over that loss will be lessened. You will feel these passions so strongly. And so it's the classic Stoic principle that you can't control things outside of you, but you can't control what's within you, your judgments and your reactions and your beliefs about things. And that will lead to some kind of effective control over your aspect of life. I hope you enjoyed listening to this episode. And before we will continue, I wanted to mention that you can find all the books and ideas that Professor Nadler mentions in this episode on my website, which will be in the description of this episode. You can also join my monthly newsletter to receive my book recommendations, book summaries and interviews with the future guests straight to your inbox. I would like to thank everyone who has already joined my newsletter. I was surprised how many replies I got when I shared Professor Nadler's book. And now let's continue with the rest of the episode. Is there good and evil in Spinoza's way of thinking? Or, of course, like, since it is deterministic, there can't be, nature cannot be good or evil. It is the way it is. It is true that nature is the way it is. And so nothing taken by itself is good or bad. Nature as a whole is neither good nor bad. And nothing in nature, without relation to anything else, is good or bad. So poisonous snakes, arsenic, rocks falling on people, rocks, sharp objects, none of these things are bad. Water, healthy food, none of these things are good in and of themselves. Something is good, but there are, things do have the qualities of being good or bad. It's not all subjective. Spinoza does not think that it's only good if you think it's good, and it's only bad if you think it's bad. Things are, for Spinoza, objectively good or bad, not in themselves, but only insofar as they bear a relation to the well-being of an individual. So even though arsenic is neither good nor bad in itself, it's bad for a human being because it decreases our essence. It harms our power of persevering. Whereas vitamins and healthy and good food, I should use the word good, vitamins and water and protein are good, again, not in and of themselves, but because they strengthen us, they contribute to our well-being, and that is an objective matter of fact. It's not subjective. Arsenic doesn't become good if I want it to be good, and arsenic is not bad just because I think it's bad. It really is bad for me. What about our actions, the choices that we make? So if I decide to harm someone, so obviously, like for me, like right now, if you ask me, I would say that's an evil action. Why are you doing logic in this? But what is Spinoza's answer to this when there are clear actions that are evil? Well, there are no actions that are evil in and of themselves. They're only evil if the doing of the action harms the agent. So the same principle applies here as it did to arsenic and water and carrots. If an action is done in such a way that it decreases my power, so let's take an example. Spinoza says that hate is a sadness. It's a sadness with a recognition of the external cause of your sadness, and he defines sadness as a decrease in my power. So hatred is bad because to experience hatred is to experience a decrease in my power. So if I harm another person out of hate, my doing that action harms me. And again, to bring Socrates back in the conversation, Socrates says that the doing of a wrong harms the wrongdoer even more than it harms the person who is wrong. And I think Spinoza would agree with that. If my action is done out of hate or envy or spite or jealousy or any of the kinds of emotions that he describes as sadnesses, as weaknesses in me, then the doing of that action is bad for me. On the other hand, you could think of one in the same action that's done both from hatred and from love. Let's say I push somebody. If I push somebody because I hate them, that's a sadness and it's bad. It's bad action. It's bad action for me. But let's say I push somebody because a car was coming and I push them because I love them and I didn't want to see them harmed. Then in that case, the action came from strength, my strength, not my weakness. And in that case, it was a good action. Could you please describe the concept of Konatus for our listeners? Yeah, it's a kind of existential inertia in a way that every individual, so the table I'm pushing on here, why does it fall apart when I push on it? Well, because it's striving to maintain itself. It's got a Konatus. It's striving to persevere. And that's true also of human beings. What we are are individual parcels of Konatus or striving. What I am is a striving to persevere as the individual I am and even striving to increase my power as an individual. And that striving on my part, which is my essence, my power, will come into contact in both positive and negative ways with other strivings. So when a rock falls on my head, my striving has been poorly affected by the striving of the rock. On the other hand, when another person and I work together to achieve some goal, cooperatively, our strivings are mutually beneficial there. But this notion of Konatus is absolutely central to Spinoza's conception of what things are and what nature is. And if nature is just infinite, eternal power or striving, then each of us as a part of nature is a finite or determinate parcel of that infinite, eternal striving. That's what we are. How does it differ in terms of human beings between us? Like, do we also have certain degrees of striving in our lives? Does that explain why certain people are more successful, more capable of persevering in chasing their goals? Or am I talking about a completely different kind of striving here? No, that seems right. Even within an individual, the power of striving has its ups and downs. This is what we were talking about before when we were talking about good or bad. My power of striving can be weakened by some factors. That's what sadness is. When I experience sadness, I'm experiencing a weakening in my Konatus. When I'm feeling joy, I'm experiencing an increase in my striving. And this can be brought about by lots of different external factors. And so some people will be enjoying a very high level of Konatus. Other people may be experiencing a lower level, depending upon how things are going in their lives. The Konatus is never extinguished except when you die. So there's always, I mean, because it's the essence of any individual, there's always some Konatus. But it fluctuates both within the individual and there are variations between individuals. I always like kind of towards the middle of our interview. I'm always curious about when people dedicate their lives to the ideas of people like Spinoza. I'm curious what did draw you to explore Spinoza's ideas to write this book? Could you please tell a little bit about your path of discovering Spinoza? Sure. I mean, I've always, right from graduate school, I've worked on philosophy in the 17th century. That's always been a special interest of mine. And originally, I was working on Descartes and Cartesians and continue to work on them. But at a certain point, I thought Spinoza is somebody who I really need to get to know better. Both because I was fascinated being Jewish myself, I was fascinated by the Jewish background. I noticed that there really wasn't any good biography of Spinoza. And I wanted to write something that would get read by more than my fellow specialists in the field. And I thought a biography of Spinoza has a chance of being read by general readers outside of academia. So I thought Spinoza was the perfect project to start working on. And once Spinoza gets a hold of you, he doesn't let go. It's easy to become obsessed with Spinoza because it's so fascinatingly difficult and so difficultly fascinating that you constantly go back to Spinoza, try to understand him better. And so much of what I've written has been my attempt to both try to get to know Spinoza, his thought and his life better, and also try to help other people understand him. And I would also say I was attracted by Spinoza's sheer originality and radicalness. I mean, everyone loves a radical, somebody who stands outside the mainstream and is willing to take bold stances. And a rebel, I should say. I think Spinoza qualifies in that respect as somebody whose life and ideas stand out so much in the 17th century that it's hard not to be interested in investigating him. Is there an idea by Spinoza that you either don't fully understand or it constantly is on your mind? Is there like a particular idea that grips you? Oh, lots. I mean, I'm still debating with my fellow scholars, was Spinoza an atheist in any meaningful sense? What is his conception of God? I'm also always trying to figure, you know, you read the ethics or you read the theological political treatise, and I'm still coming upon propositions or statements of his that I thought I understood. And I realized, well, no, I don't really understand it. His views on democracy, the degree to which he believes we should tolerate freedom of expression, there are points at which he seems to want to put limits on freedom of speech. Yeah, it's hard to think of any part of Spinoza that I'm always not questioning and coming upon with a new reading and thinking, well, I thought I had that. Now I'm not so sure. Is there an idea that kind of changed, influenced your life significantly? Just to give you an example, to illustrate what kind of question I'm asking, is that one of the ideas that I'm pondering is about the morality and habit. If you are being, let's say, good out of habit, and you're doing good actions, just out of habit, does that make the action good? Or it is the active intention of doing a good action each time? Is there a similar idea from Spinoza, or in this situation, like from any other philosopher, that kind of is constantly in your, not daily, but like it often pops up in your life? I think that's one of my favorite questions of moral philosophy. Who is, in moral terms, who is better? The person who does what's right automatically and instinctively, or the person who does what's right in a very self-conscious and reflective way, because it's right? And for Spinoza, I'm not sure there's a clear difference between the two, because the free and rationally virtuous person will always do what's right. They'll always act in ways that benefit themselves and benefit others. At the same time, and even if they're doing it at a certain point instinctively, they're always capable, I think, of rationally defending their action and explaining and understanding why they do what they do. So, even if their behavior at a given moment is instinctive, they are not unaware of what they're doing and the principles on which they're doing it. And I think by reading Spinoza, by being a philosopher generally, you can't help but ask yourself those sorts of questions. I mean, we all have to act instinctively at times, whether as citizens, as parents, as friends, as lovers. But at the same time, what doing philosophy brings you to doing is always being thoughtful about your particular actions and about the life you're leading. I think if doing philosophy does anything, it's that. It makes you into a more reflective and self-aware person, which is why I'm always very disappointed when I think about, or very sad when I think that we don't teach philosophy to children. Most people don't get any philosophy until they go to college or university, and then only if they choose to take a philosophy class. I mean, there's philosophy sometimes taught in high schools here, but it's very rare. But we teach young children math and science, which are very difficult disciplines. Why are we not teaching them philosophy, even at the most basic level? Children are natural philosophers. They're always asking why, why, why. Why not introduce them to the great why questions, and also to the ways in which thinking can go well and thinking can go badly. From, like, if you could advise to, let's say, a teenager, let's say 13 or 14-year-old, who's like a person who's reflective, conscious, intelligent, but hasn't read any philosophy book, as an introduction to reflection, what is there a particular philosopher you would tell them to start with? Or maybe there's a particular philosopher or a branch of philosophy or a certain century of philosophers. What would you advise them to begin with? Without question, Plato. Any particular works? Yeah, so whenever I teach introduction to philosophy, and this is usually to first semester university students, most of them have never had any philosophy, the very first things we always read are Plato's Euthyphro, Apology, and Crito, because right there you get, in the Euthyphro, the notion about, you get introduced to this notion of whether you're acting instinctively, or whether you're thinking about the values that inform your actions. In the Apology, you get Socrates' defense of the examined life. And in the Crito, very particular questions about what is my role as a citizen, and what is my relationship to the state? These three dialogues are very accessible, and they raise all the great questions. And from there, you can go ahead and read more Plato. I think there's no better introduction to philosophy than Plato's dialogues. I mean, some of them are quite complex, and I wouldn't direct everybody to any, all of them, Thetis, Parmenides, and so on. After Plato, why not read Descartes' Meditations, where you can be introduced to epistemology, questions of skepticism. And while you may not like the direction Descartes goes in calling upon God to validate human reason, nonetheless, the epistemological questions are raised there very nicely, and very clearly. Was Plato the first philosopher you've read as a teenager? Yeah, the very first course I took at the university was Introduction to Philosophy, and we started, I believe, with Euthyphro. What was your first impression at that, how old were you at that time? I was 17. And what was your impression when you read it? What were your first... My first thought was, this is what I want to do with the rest of my life. But, you know, I give credit to the professor of that course, who later became a mentor and a very good friend. I thought, this is really exciting and interesting stuff, and I can't think of a better way to spend my life than reading and thinking and teaching about it. In my personal experience, every teacher, everything that I'm ever was interested in so far in my life was thanks to good teachers. And unfortunately, at this age, I discovered that there are many other subjects that are really interesting, but I was not interested because of the bad teachers. Physics is one of the examples, I'm really curious about it, but unfortunately, because of the bad teacher, it didn't turn out well. Yeah, I absolutely agree. If I could put this book in a parcel and send it three or four centuries back to Spinoza, and he would have opened, he could understand English, what do you think you would say, tell about your book? That's a good question. I hope he would say, yep, that's pretty much right. But, you know, one of the things I'd love to be able to do is to go back to Spinoza and go through with him all the ways in which I read him and have him answer my questions, and have him, and that's just my question, but the questions that scholars have raised for generations, and, you know, can you tell us who's right on this as I read you and who's not right? Another kind of fantastical question for me, if I had the magical powers and I could replace myself by supernatural powers that Spinoza denied and bring him back, and he can sit on this Zoom call, and you could ask him one or two questions. Are there any questions that you would ask him? What would that question be? Well, I mean, aside from questions about his philosophy, because I could do that if I go back in time, I would like to get his take on our current, you know, the current state of the world. You know, I think he would look at American politics today and the way in which a certain political party is violating the norms of democracy and the way in which it's being influenced by religion, and he would say, that is exactly what I warned you about. That is precisely what I was worried about happening in the Dutch Republic, and now I see you should be very concerned yourselves about how it's happening now. How would he explain why, 300 years later, in a country such as the United States, he would witness the same thing? For the same reasons it was happening back then. People seek power, but they seek it not under the guidance of reason, but under the guidance of their passions, of their irrational beliefs, and this is what happens. That's really interesting. I guess you already answered my question about books that you would recommend, but usually towards the end of the interview, I ask my guests to recommend a couple of books, and maybe this time you recommended Plato and books that were published back in time, but, like, are there any contemporary philosophy books that you've recently read and enjoyed that you think that our listeners would benefit from them? Yes, the problem is thinking of one or two now off the top of my head. I very much enjoy reading Susan Wolf's book on meaning in life. I think it's a very nice discussion of the questions around that. It caught me off guard with that one. I mean, most of my time is spent reading articles or chapters of books, and so I don't really haven't given a thought to synthesizing it all now, but what I do enjoy reading is philosophy when it's written clearly and excessively, and I think some, so Martha Nussbaum, okay, said a book, her book, The Fragility of Goodness, on the role of moral luck. I think her book, The Fragility of Goodness, is one of the great works of philosophy, and not just philosophy, great works of philosophy and literature and art in recent decades. Derek Parfitt's books on, so the title is escaping me, Tom Scanlon's book, What We Owe to Each Other. These are all very good contributions that philosophy can make to public intellectual life. Unfortunately, they tend to be rather dense and not easily accessible to ordinary readers, but you know, I think the way in which St. John Rawls' Theory of Justice has become part of our intellectual culture, I think philosophers would do well to write more in that vein. Are there any new projects that you're working on, and I wanted to ask if there is anything that I haven't asked you that I should have asked? So, I have a biography of Descartes coming out in the spring, 23, in this series by Reaction Books called Renaissance Lives, and it's putting Descartes and his life and his ideas in their historical context. I'm also returning to an old passion of mine and working on some Cartesian philosophers and problems of metaphysics and causation. These are not really going to be popular books, but every once in a while, I feel like I need to get back to the technical stuff that's a lot of fun to do, even if it doesn't get read by a lot of people. After that, I would like to do a book on philosophical, the social aspects of philosophy in the 17th century, looking at the dialogues, both explicit and implicit, that took place, how philosophizing was a very communicative enterprise. Descartes responding to Hobbes, responding to Gaston D, Leibniz and Spinoza meeting in the Hague, and all these ways in which philosophers honed their ideas by, in conversation, both explicit and implicit with others. I think that would be a very interesting book to write, one that I would be writing for general readers, to give them an entree into the philosophical world of the 17th century. The first book, when is it coming out? Is there a date for it? I'm going to guess April of 23. Just something for our listeners to look forward to. Well, if your listeners are interested, so I also dabble a bit in art history, and my biography of Frans Hals, the 17th century Dutch painter, is being published in just a couple of weeks, and that should be available soon. Oh, that's great. I was standing in front of Frans Hals' boy with a skull, literally yesterday at the National Gallery London, and I was just like, it was a very stunning, astonishing painting. That's great. So, it's coming out in a couple of weeks, you said. Yeah, that's great. I'll be looking out for that one. Is there anything that I haven't asked you, that you were like, you said that this interviewer has missed the crucial question that he had to ask, and he didn't? No, we covered a lot of ground. It's been fun talking with you. Thank you so much, first of all, for the book, and for this interview. I've received so many emails thanking me for sharing your book, and asking me all those questions that we explored. Thank you so much, Professor Nadler. I'm really looking forward to your future books. Oh, thank you. Thank you for having me, and for inviting me to be on. If you are hearing this, congratulations. You are probably a nerd. I hope you enjoyed listening to this episode with Professor Nadler. You can follow this podcast on Instagram at Arminicus, or sign up to my monthly newsletter. Both of those links will be in the description of this episode. Once again, I would like to thank everyone who sent me their questions for Professor Nadler. If you would like to send your questions to the future guests, once again, you can do it by following me on Instagram, and sending me a direct message, or you can join my monthly newsletter, and send all your questions and inquiries to my private email. Everything will be linked in the description of this episode. This was Archidute Podcast, and I was your host, Vasir Karmanikas. I'll see you in the next one. Bye.
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