The Situation
Here’s the situation: you’re at a bar, you’re a little tipsy, and there’s a guy. And that guy, well, he’s decided to move the conversation to Nietzsche. Whether you want to impress him or lightly check his ego, it’s always fun to have a little banger of a comment prepared for these kinds of situations. We all know that being hot and smart are not mutually exclusive, and honestly, I would love for my readers—who I know are all hot and cool and smart and kind—to have a few bangers on deck. It’s a personal goal of mine for Hot Girls everywhere, when confronted with a pompous intellectual, to effortlessly pull off a Will Hunting.
That’s precisely why we’re here today.
Welcome to The Hot Girl’s Guide to Aristotle.
Today we’re talking about Western philosophy. I’m here with my Anonymous Expert—a distinguished graduate in philosophy from Berkeley, Oxford, and Harvard—to get to the bottom of this whole philosophy thing.
Below, you will find a transcription of our conversation, a whirlwind tour through the “big hitters” of Western philosophy. A few of the topics and philosophers we covered:
Academia • Aristotle • Plato • Friendship • Lana Del Rey • Philosophy of Language • Music • Women • Legally Blonde • Law • Aquinas • God • Dōgen • Hobbes • Locke • Hume • Rousseau • Marx • Descartes • Cartesian Dualism • Mental Health • Kant • Hot Girl Walks • Hegel • Heidegger • Wittgenstein • Nietzsche • Kierkegaard • Pinterest Quotes • Bella Hadid • Selfies • Beauty • Nature • Philosophy Bros • Reflexivity • Love • & More
Depending on the time this reaches you, I strongly encourage you to head to your favorite café for a cappuccino or pour yourself a generous glass of pinot noir, because it’s time to learn, babe.
The Interview
CS: Thanks so much for being here with me today. So, isn’t philosophy just for the weird guys in college who don’t shower enough?
AE: [Laughs.] That’s right today, sadly. Philosophy has become a refuge from reality for people who want to think their own thoughts in a kind of secular priesthood of the intelligent. They are not interested in connecting their own thinking to the world as it is. Philosophy should be very practical about how to think and how to live. But their larger professional meetings are like the religious conclaves of the past, speaking only to one another, and fighting only with one another, scratching their heads about what they’re saying and why they’re saying it.
So that’s today. But when we look back on the great philosophers of the past, why should we listen to these guys? I mean, to be a philosopher, don’t you have to be a bit of a nutjob? (No offense.)
You do. Because you have to be willing to step back from the world and think about it, and step back from your own views and question them. The ability to step back from your own interests and your own desires is a real challenge. What’s great about philosophy—throughout all the ages—is that it forces you to ask yourself questions, and then to question the answers that you give. That way of living is really important, it leads us to better ways of living with one another, better ways of thinking. But it also can separate you from the world and make you irrelevant. The best philosophers walk the line of irrelevance, but are able to reach across it with what they say. We who are not philosophers can benefit from them walking the line between relevance and irrelevance.
Jumping right into it, who is the best philosopher in the world, ever?
[Laughs.] There are a lot of big hitters in philosophy, obviously. To my mind, the Babe Ruth of philosophy has to be Aristotle (Greece, 384 – 322 B.C.). And partly that’s because he faced one of the greatest pitchers to ever throw a hard inside fastball of an idea to any batter: Plato. Plato could bring the heat. What’s amazing is that Aristotle, who was his student for twenty years, wound up crushing some home runs against Plato. In the history of the world, very few have done that. All the rest of us stand, if you will, on Aristotle’s shoulders. It’s hard to see how we would be thinking about the world as insightfully as we do if Aristotle had not been in it.
What were some of his “home runs”?
This may seem a bit academic, but all Hot Girls, as you call them, should be able to speak to the genius of Aristotle responding to Plato in what we might call the philosophy of language, or the philosophy of thinking.
Go on.
Plato had this idea that every time you used a word “X,” every instance of that word had one common thing shared between them. So if the word was “goodness,” there was a thing called “goodness” and it was exactly the same kind of thing in every instance of the use of that word.
Plato wanted the precision of what’s called univocity, “one-meaning” words, in just the way science today uses its words. The hard edge of science requires that a single word have a single meaning. That is to say, it progresses with univocal definitions: water is always H20, for example.
What Aristotle said was that this isn’t how language works. There are lots of “many-meaning” words. And the subtleties and interconnections of those words are actually essential to how we talk and think. To say that this is a good pencil is quite different from saying you are a good person. The word is the same, but there is not one thing common between all things we call good. That idea, that some of our most basic words are polymorphous, that they have multiple, related meanings, radically reopens language and the way we think about thinking. It invites the use of analogies and metaphors, which of course we see in literature. Aristotle’s challenge, from Plato’s greatest student, radically changed the world of philosophy.
I feel like I take this for granted. I can’t imagine language without that, honestly.
Other philosophers built on this idea over time. We see it later, in Wittgenstein, when he’s facing a new era of science and “one-meaning” words. There’s no one thing that these words have in common. They instead have family likenesses. That idea of family likeness is such a beautiful, homey understanding of what Aristotle called focal meaning. They share a likeness, but they don’t share a definition.
I can see how this relates to Aristotle’s account of friendship, but maybe you can expand upon that.
Absolutely. A great way to understand Aristotle’s methods and his genius is to look at his account of friendship. What Aristotle says, is that there is a central case of friendship, and that is what he calls the “friendship of true friends.” That is when the other person’s well-being counts as much—or even more—than your own. Their happiness is so constitutive of your own, that you don’t know, in a way, the difference between them.
That’s a perfect definition, even today.
Yes. And this is something said 2,500 years ago. And the genius of this idea also includes what he called focal meaning. “The friendship of true friends,” that’s the central case of friendship. But there are other cases of friendship, where you still use the word friendship, but it means something different. Like in business, when you have a common interest, but you’re both furthering your individual interests. That’s a kind of friendship, but it’s not the focal case, or the central case.
Aristotle also said that friendship is a good in and of itself. Can you say more about Aristotle’s concept of the good?
That’s absolutely right. Friendship, like truth, like beauty, are good in and of themselves. Which means that you’re not using them for anything other than the joy, the experience, and the sharing of them. That’s what it means to be a good in itself. That idea radically changes the way we think about each other, the beauty of a great painting, everything.
So that’s Aristotle when it comes to greatest philosophers of all time. But I can’t help but feel that you’re overlooking Lana Del Rey. Have you heard of Lana Del Rey?
I’ve never even heard of her name before.
She’s a singer. Look, give her a listen and get back to me on whether or not she’s a philosopher. I’m curious, what would Aristotle think about Lana Del Rey?
Music, for Aristotle, is an expression of beauty and he probably would think that it is something good in itself. That is to say, it is worthwhile to sit and listen to beautiful music.
Can you say a bit more about Aristotle’s views on women? I know there’s not a great track record there.
Aristotle’s account of women is hideous. Women, in many ways, in his thinking, were beneath slaves. In that Greco-Roman world, slaves and slavery were as common as half the people in a particular city. So these are two terrible forms of oppression: slavery and misogyny. In culture, there was a total dismissing and diminishing of women systematically.
What do you take away from this?
This shows us that every philosopher has blind spots. Every philosopher gets things wrong. Sometimes, because the culture in which they live gets it wrong, they can’t step back from their own culture well enough to see the hideous mistakes that culture makes. I would suggest that the way our modern culture embraces war and technology, and our inability to step back and question our commitments to those things, may be blind spots that future generations will see.
I hope so. I’m sorry to say the only Aristotle quote I know by heart is “The law is reason free from passion.” (That’s from Legally Blonde, a formative Hot Girl film.) Thoughts?
Makes a lot of sense to me. When law is the tool of the powerful or the influential, it’s just a club with which to beat one’s enemies.
So, to summarize, Aristotle is the grandfather of Western philosophy.
Yes. Our world is unrecognizable without Aristotle. We all sit on his shoulders. He bested Plato. He was the tutor to Alexander the Great. He was a kind of biologist. But most importantly, his Nicomachean Ethics, remains one of the surest guides to how to live a meaningful life. And at the heart of that is his account of friendship, and how to live life sharing it with true friends.
Would you say Aquinas is the next “big hitter”?
Thomas Aquinas (Italy, 1274 – 1323 A.D.) was of great importance following from Aristotle. The genius of Aquinas is largely lost to our world because we don’t take seriously what he took seriously. Aquinas wanted to live fully and he wanted everyone to live fully, but he thought what was essential to living fully was a friendship with God. And a complete self-emptying of oneself in love for others.
That’s not a message we often hear today.
He could not be more at odds with our world today. He was uninterested in the joys of the body, not that he didn’t understand them. He celebrated the beauty of marriage, for example. But he gave his mind to other things — to God and truth. He was God obsessed; and he possessed the most rigorous mind possibly ever expressed in writing. There’s a great tragedy in philosophy because most philosophers won’t read him today because God mattered too much for him. So much of modern philosophy and the analytical tradition could trace its roots to him. His mind had a precision and focus that philosophers today, I think, often lack.
I know I said we should focus on Western philosophy to keep this somewhat manageable, but I’m sure you’d want to mention something about Dōgen in this context.
Definitely. Dōgen Zenji (Japan, 1200 – 1253 A.D.) lived around the same time as Aquinas. He’s the founder of the Sōtō Zen school which is pure genius and amazingly similar to Aquinas’s account of the interconnectedness and dynamism of all things.
Dōgen lived in Japan at the same time that Aquinas was living in Italy and France. They said some remarkably similar things without ever knowing of each other’s existence or each other’s countries. They emphasized the interconnectedness of all things, the dynamism, the activity of all that is, and the freeing power of thinking. Those seem to me to be the true legacies of philosophy, whether in Western culture or elsewhere. The freeing power of thinking, the connectedness we have as human beings, and then the dynamism, the activity, of living.
That’s incredible. Do you want to move to the English, the Germans, or the French next?
Let’s do the English, starting with Hobbes (1588 – 1679 A.D.). Hobbes was a coward who loved bold people.
[Laughs.]
He thought that words were clubs and they were used to hit other people into submission, to persuade them, to convince them. All these French Foucault power-based philosophers actually owe their understanding of language to Hobbes. In Hobbes, words are clubs for the unruly, and the king—the sovereign—was the wielder of the club to keep everyone in order.
In some ways, we see echoes of that happening today.
Hobbes was essentially a quiet schoolteacher who lived in a heroic age but not anything like a hero. He was an apologist for the powerful, and the even more powerful state. What’s remarkable is how modern, in that sense, he is. We all live in Hobbes’ world, still today. His account, his genius, was essentially a materialist account of human beings where desires were given, and that our intelligence was to be used to satisfy our desires. He sees us human beings as pleasure machines that only want to be well-oiled. He thought of human beings as mechanical machines. Today, we talk about ourselves as if we’re computers. We say we’re processing, not thinking. That’s what computers do. We talk about our own hardware and software. It’s very strange.
Definitely. What about John Locke (England, 1632 – 1704 A.D.) and David Hume (Scotland, 1711 – 1776 A.D.)?
Locke is important for political philosophy and the American Republic, but I think he’s secondary. He can be seen as important, but he’s really just the ricochet of bullets fired by others. Hume is the way into understanding the mind of English philosophy, which is elegant, skeptical, and profoundly wrong.
[Laughs.] Alright. What about the French?
Well, we could start with Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Geneva, 1712 – 1778 A.D.), who was profoundly important. Rousseau is the guy who first wrote beautifully about human alienation. The kind of alienation we relate to, which is in big commercial cities, feeling lost in the crowd, having lost your way, not living as the animal you know you are.
That hits hard. Marx also talks about alienation, but I assume we’ll get to him later.
The best part of Marx on alienation is what he took from Rousseau. Marx’s alienation is in the shadow of Rousseau. If you want that, in the pure body it came from, read Rousseau. He understands. He had such a mind for that alienation, and yet, in his own life, he seemed so heartless. He wrote a book about educating children and abandoned all five of his children to orphanages as they were born. He told you and me how to raise our children but he refused to do that himself. He lived out that very alienation he was describing.
That’s brutal. I took “Philosophy of Mind” in college and we talked a lot about Descartes (France, 1596 – 1650 A.D.). Could you tell us a little bit about him?
René Descartes has got to be mentioned in the list of great philosophers and is, in many ways, far more important than Locke and Hume.
Descartes is famous, or rather infamous, for the distinction between what he called “two substances”—the body and the mind. This cartesian dualism, as it came to be called, has haunted philosophy since Descartes put word to page. The idea that we are more our thinking than we are our bodies, that that’s our “truer” self, has some truth to it, but why it was ever put in opposition to our bodies is hard to understand. Descartes is like a man who lives only on the second floor of his house, and has forgotten entirely that there’s a first floor. That doesn’t mean he was wrong about the existence and the nature of the second floor. How you connect the first and second floors has bedeviled modern philosophy ever since.
People really do seem to think of their bodies and their minds as totally separate these days. We’re all so obsessed with the distinction between “mental health” and “physical health” for instance. Can you say a little more about this?
One way of thinking of Descartes’ dualism is that everything is mediated through a “dirty window,” and that dirty window is our mind. Everything we see and think is mediated through a dirty window, as if our minds color and distort the world we see in front of us and also the very thoughts we think. What’s funny about that today, is that finally, in some sense, Descartes is right. All of our experiences are mediated by our phones. A philosophical mistake has become a practical reality.
Yeah. It’s really a bummer about the phones. Shall we talk about the Germans?
Personally, I find most German philosophers to be alternatingly impenetrable and odious, depending on which ones we’re talking about.
Go off.
Well, Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger, all seem to share and delight in the complexity of their own thought. But Kant is really important.
Let’s start with him.
The best thing that Immanuel Kant (Germany, 1724 – 1804 A.D.) ever wrote, in my opinion, is his philosophy of aesthetics. Which is ironic, because he was a pretty unattractive man.
I think you could divide all philosophers into walkers and sitters. Kant, even though he took a daily stroll, timed precisely every day, was really a sitter. He mulled, systematized, squeezed the life out of thinking, out of beauty, all in an effort to try to tell the truth about them. He suffocated those things by sitting on them so much. The real walkers were Aristotle, Nietzsche, Rousseau, Kierkegaard, and Wittgenstein. If you ever have any doubts, trust the walkers, and question the sitters when it comes to philosophy.
I like that a lot. Are you familiar with the concept of a “Hot Girl Walk”?
I am not, but it sounds like a good use of time.
It is. I feel like people are always talking about Hegel these days, but I’ve never read any of his stuff.
Hegel (Germany, 1770 – 1831 A.D.) is typical of great German philosophers. Profound, but ultimately meaningless. The idea of a thesis and its antithesis clashing, resulting in a synthesis, is a grand way of saying “something happened.”
[Laughs.] Saving the worst for last: what about Heidegger?
Heidegger was a nasty piece of work. The best part of Martin Heidegger (Germany, 1889 – 1976 A.D.) is what he stole from Aquinas and other medievals and restated in modern language. The worst part of Heidegger was his strategic, evil embrace of Nazi antisemitism. No one should discuss Heidegger without acknowledging that he was hideous in his injustices to the Jews with whom he worked and with his desire to become the court philosopher of Hitler’s national socialism. That said, if you find anything worthwhile in Heidegger, go back and read the real stuff from whom he took it: medieval philosophers most people don’t know and don’t want to read, and accept that someone with such hideous views could look critically on the modern world and our technology obsession and question it. Hideous Martin Heidegger is better left as an asterisk than as a genius in philosophy.
Karl Marx (Germany, 1818 – 1883 A.D.) is very “of the moment,” though it seems like the peak of that resurgence may have passed. What are your thoughts on him?
The best part of Marx is unoriginal with him, the worst part of Marx is when he has the courage to think for himself.
[Laughs.] You’re gonna make some people mad with that one.
Where Marx is original, he’s almost entirely rejected, even by those who call themselves Marxians today. No one who has examined Marx’s labor theory of value, his most original “insight,” takes it seriously today. Marx proves the power of ideas, because a strange man writing fevered thoughts all day in the British Library did, in some real way, change the world. But it also proves that philosophy can quickly become ideology, which can corrupt the world. Powerful ideas can change the world and corrupt the world.
Indeed. What about Wittgenstein?
Ludwig Wittgenstein (Austria, 1889 – 1951 A.D.) is the most important philosopher in the 20th century, in my opinion. He was the truest philosopher, a beautiful man with an unrelenting commitment to the truth and to asking the world and himself hard questions.
Wittgenstein was the son of one of the wealthiest industrialists in all of Europe, and he gave away his entire inheritance and became a kind of monk for the truth.
Wow.
He was a philosopher on his own quest to understand the world and himself. He wrote his first book, the only one published in his lifetime, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, and in it, he wrote out the strongest possible case for a purified and purely scientific account of language.
He retired from philosophy, he thought he’d done his work, and then, asking himself questions about the work he had written, he wrote a second book, the Philosophical Investigations, that is pure genius. It is not a typical philosophy book, it is a workbook for philosophers. It asks the reader questions and demands that you think with him. What he does in that book is not to abandon what he said in his first book, but rather to broaden his understanding of language and the human mind.
He basically understood that the language of science is not the paradigm for all thinking, or for all living. But it is a very important and brilliant way of thinking. Science is like one neighborhood in the city of thinking. It’s a great place to visit, it’s a wonderful way to live, but it’s not the only way. The reason he isn’t read more today is because his work is challenging, but also because it questions the dominant paradigm of science as the model for thinking. We are in the grips of that model still, and it’s hard for us to step back from that way of thinking and really, fully understand Wittgenstein’s challenges to it.
Totally. Alright, maybe we should talk about everybody’s favorite these days... The dark prince. Let’s talk about Nietzsche (German, 1844 – 1900 A.D.).
Wow. What a troubled, vulnerable, misunderstood person and thinker he was. They used to say that Nietzsche was an arrogant man striding across all of philosophy that had come before him, that his madness came from syphilis, and that he was the “bad boy” of philosophy. Philosophy by an angry man in a leather jacket.
None of that is true. He probably was celibate his whole life, he didn’t have syphilis, he had a series of increasingly severe strokes where he slowly lost the use of parts of his mind, just as his father did. And yet, with all of that, he was open-hearted in his despair and his desire to find another way to live from the crudely collectivist living in the academies and in what today we’d call corporate life.
I’ve never heard him talked about in that way. Open-heartedness. I like that.
Well, Søren Kierkegaard (Denmark, 1813 – 1855 A.D.) is the great philosopher of whole-heartedness. And by that I mean, the practical urgency of living the truth, and not just speaking it. Philosophy has become distant from our lives, because it doesn’t take whole-heartedness seriously. If philosophy is just about the meaning of words, about the truth of propositions, it’s largely meaningless to our lives. What Kierkegaard brings, is this incessant demand, a fire-alarm saying don’t just think it, live it. He’s a killer, he’s really good.
I love that. I’m curious what your reactions might be to some modern “Pinterest mantras” like, “there’s a right time for everything” and “everything happens for a reason.”
Those ideas are both tautologies. Its faux wisdom, because it’s both true and meaningless. Yes, everything happens for a reason because material causation is a reality in the world. And if causation is a reason, it’s always true. There’s a right time for everything? Yeah, it’s when the thing happened.
[Laughs.] Supermodel Bella Hadid once said, “I feel awkward taking a selfie sometimes. It feels a little weird.” Discuss.
Of course it’s awkward. It should always be awkward when you’re selling a lie.
A selfie isn’t necessarily a lie.
I suppose that’s true. But she didn’t always look like that. Maybe she listened to our culture’s incessant, manipulative whisper: that even the most beautiful among us are not beautiful enough, that we need experts to “improve” ourselves. Bella Hadid has a face like a golf course, remade by experts for commercial gain, when the natural condition was plenty beautiful enough. Nature has a rough, but authentic beauty. Like the natural land, we are all plenty beautiful enough, just as we are.
Damn. What’s something the “philosophy bros” often get wrong?
The biggest problem modern philosophers make is thinking that thinking itself is merely propositional. That is to say, they think philosophy is just about stating narrow truths, when actually, done right, philosophy is about living the big truths.
That’s great. I really love that. What’s something you could say at a party that would really stump a philosopher?
The hardest questions for most modern philosophers, even for those who have written many erudite books, are the following: “Is thinking more than merely biological? Is love, too?”
Yeah…
I say that because materialists want to suggest that reflexive thinking—thinking about our thinking and about our desires—isn’t a true stepping back, but just the whirring and buzzing of the biology in our brain.
One has to ask, “What is real?” That question—“What is real?”—is a very modern question, especially when it comes to the internet. We ask ourselves what is real when we see photos and what is real about our own desires and emotions. Unfortunately philosophy, especially philosophy of mind, has become imprisoned in a crudely materialist account of thinking and so is of almost no help to us. Once you eliminate the human capacity for reflexivity and reduce us to meat in the room, we’re totally lost.
Hard agree. I think we’re coming up on time, so I want to say, on behalf of all the Hot Girls reading this, thank you so much for your time today.
Anytime. You’re very welcome.