The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – A Terribly Serious Adventure: Philosophy and War at Oxford, 1900-1960 by Nikhil Krishnan

Episode Date: July 22, 2023

A Terribly Serious Adventure: Philosophy and War at Oxford, 1900-1960 by Nikhil Krishnan https://amzn.to/44VNCpK “Lively storytelling . . . an attempt to recast the history of philosophy at Oxford in the mid-twentieth century by conveying not only what made it influential in its time but also what might make it vital in ours.”—The New York Times Book Review What are the limits of language? How can philosophy be brought closer to everyday life? What is a good human being? These were among the questions that philosophers wrestled with in mid-twentieth-century Britain, a period shadowed by war and the rise of fascism. In response to these events, thinkers such as Philippa Foot (originator of the famous trolley problem), Isaiah Berlin, Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Anscombe, Gilbert Ryle, and J. L. Austin aspired to a new level of watchfulness and self-awareness about language as a way of keeping philosophy true to everyday experience. A Terribly Serious Adventure traces the friendships and the rivalries, the shared preoccupations and the passionate disagreements of some of Oxford’s most innovative thinkers. Far from being stuck in their ivory towers, the Oxford philosophers lived. They were codebreakers, diplomats, and soldiers in both World Wars, and they often drew on their real-world experience in creating their greatest works, masterpieces of British modernism original in both thought and style. Steeped in the dramatic history of the twentieth century, A Terribly Serious Adventure is an eye-opening look inside the rooms that changed how we think about our world. Shedding light on the lives and intellectual achievements of a large and spirited cast of characters, Cambridge academic Nikhil Krishnan shows us how much we can still learn from the Oxford philosophers. In our fractious, post-truth world, their acute sense of responsibility for their words, their passionate desire to get the little things right, stands as an inspiring example.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from the chrisvossshow.com, the chrisvossshow.com. Welcome to the big show, my family and friends. We certainly appreciate you guys tuning in.

As always, we have the most brilliant minds on the show. We have a professor on the show. He's going to be talking to us about his brilliant work and his stuff at the University of Oxford. You may have heard of it. We have a number of professors on from Oxford, and they have the smartest people over there. Probably

because they're not American. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know what that means. But as always, refer to the show to your family, friends, and relatives. Put your arm around them and say, you want to be smarter because you're driving me crazy? Subscribe to the Chris Voss Show. Go to goodreads.com, 4chesschrissvoss, youtube.com, 4chesschrissvoss, linkedin.com, 4chesschrissvoss, the big LinkedIn newsletter. Geez, that thing grows like a worm over there. Also go to, you know, we're on TikTok,ok at chris foss one and uh a few other things there's like

threads and twitter and all that stuff you can follow us over there uh if you want i mean if you want i don't know or or if you don't want to you can you do whatever the damn hell you want it's free country but please for the love of god follow us don't make me beg. Today we have an amazing gentleman on the show. He's the author of the newest book that came out July 4th, 2023. A terribly serious adventure. Philosophy and War at Oxford between 1900 and 1960 has just come out. And he's going to be here talking just about it on the show. Nick Hill, Christian, is on the show with us today.

Sounds like I got the name right. Is that correct, Nick? Yeah, a few days, Chris. There you go. And he's going to be talking to us about his amazing book and insight and what he's sharing inside of it. He was born in Bangalore, India. He attended the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar.

This gentleman is smart. Wow, I'm just going to University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. This gentleman is smart. Wow, I'm just going to be the dumb one in the corner here. What's that old saying about if you're the smartest person in the room, it is your problem? That's the beauty of this Chris Voss show. I'm never the smartest person in the room, and that's why we have great guests. He went on to complete a doctorate in philosophy. He now teaches at the University of Cambridge, where he is a fellow of Robinson College. His essays have appeared in several publications, including The Nurker, The New Statesman, and N Plus One. Welcome to the show, sir. How are you?

I am very well. Thank you for having me on the show, Chris. There you go. And a Rhodes Scholar as well. Congratulations on that. That means you're really smart, I think. I'm not sure how smart that is. Well, I don't know. I'm never sure. I always feel like the stupidest one in the room when I'm with a bunch of other Rhodes Scholars. I always think they made a terrible mistake in having me.

Well, I mean, at least you're humble. So there you go. You've got that going for you. And what's the old, you never want to be that Dunning-Kruger person. Oh, yeah. We have a lot of them. In fact, they were just going to rename America Dunning-Kruger of the world over here. So give us a.com. Where do you want people

to follow you on the interwebs to get to know you better? Probably the best place to look for me. I don't use any social media. I've been really, really careful about that over the last few years. So probably my own website. It's myname.org. And there are links there to articles I write.

And I have a page on the various publications I write for. Perhaps the one I've been writing for the most of the last few years has been The New Yorker. So if you look for my name on The New Yorker, you'll see links to my last four or five articles. There you go. So what motivates you to write this book? Well, I came to Oxford in 2007. So I come there for school. I'm in England for the first time. I'm in a foreign country. And I'm studying the subject I've never done before called philosophy. And everyone around me seems to be just a little bit gloomy. It's like they say, oh, you've just come a little bit too late because it used to be great around here.

If you'd just come back here, come here 50 years ago, you'd have met all of these cool people, right, who were doing revolutionary new kinds of philosophy, and you missed it. They're all dead or they're all retired, and you don't see them around. And so over the next few years, I start to read these and i think well darn it i've managed to miss a golden age of philosophy and the people i'm meeting now they spend all the time telling me how it's not what it

used to be so i think to myself well so here's something i could do right um there are these people who got the chance to meet all these fabulous people who are around in the 50s i never got to do that but what i'm going to do now is to tell that story and make it my own story. So now when everyone wants to know about what happened in this golden age, they're going to hear about it from me. So it was really a way of trying to recover a world which I sort of missed and that I feel weirdly nostalgic for,

even though I wasn't there for the first round. So it was really a way of trying to get, it's kind of tribute to my teachers and my teachers teachers and all these folks i never met there you go now you've entitled it uh a terribly serious adventure uh philosophy and war at oxford what was going on what was the what was the uh things that were going on what were the things that were kicking around and and what made it so important? Sure. So I'll tell you a little bit about where the title comes from. The title comes from one of the few pieces of philosophy I've read that's also a piece of travel writing.

So it's by this guy called Ernest Nagel. He's an American philosopher living in New York in the 1930s. And he gets a sabbatical, he gets a chance to take a year off from his normal teaching, you know, professor work. And he says, what I'm going to do is to spend a year in Europe. And I'm not going to waste my time there. It's not going to be a kind of backpacking trip. I'm going to go and visit the centres of new philosophical work. So he comes to England, and he visits Cambridge. He then goes on to the city of Vienna. Then he goes on to Prague and Warsaw and Lviv in what's now Ukraine. And each of these places he thinks there's something really weird going on. There's a kind of philosophy here. It's quite mathematical. It's quite technical, really into logic, but everyone's really into it.

And he just doesn't understand why. Why is it that all these people are here thinking about the foundations of physics and its philosophical meaning? And then while he's in Vienna, he has a kind of brainwave. He kind of gets it. He says, look, there are two things going on in Vienna right now. On the one hand, you've got this very, very traditional, quite conservative society, which doesn't like new ideas. On the other hand, you've got, there's one big new idea called fascism, right? The Nazis out in the streets, they've got swastikas, they're burning things, they're shutting down the university. And he thinks, well, imagine you're a student, you're a 21 year old kid who's going to university in the Europe of this period. And on the one hand, what you want is some way of having your new ideas taken seriously and not someone telling you

oh you just you know keep quiet you're too young to have your own ideas but on the other hand you want something that's not just messed up by politics you want to just think about something that's taken away from the rest of you know politics and violence so he says philosophy in this period then becomes at the same time the pastime of a recluse and a terribly serious adventure it preserves you from politics but it's also a chance for you to do something new and exciting there you go and and uh you you talk about different thinkers from that age one is uh uh philippa foot do i have that pronounced right uh the originator of the famous trolley problem i've seen a lot of people talk about that trolley problem on TikTok. That seems to be a radiant meme. And other people, and I imagine there was not only fascism with Mussolini and Hitler, but there's. That's right. So, you might think that what this kind of philosophy that I'm interested in, the standard label for it is ordinary language philosophy. And the crucial word in that, lots of people get really obsessed with the language bit of that. They say, oh, it's all really boring. It's all about words. But I think the really the kind of philosophy which sets itself against a certain way of doing thinking

right where you think oh if all of us think something there must be something wrong with it so you've got to be weird you've got to be eccentric you've got to come up with something new and philosophy is meant to be a big disruptor and they kind of have almost the opposite view they think that a lot of what goes wrong in philosophy is that we overthink things and what happens when we overthink things is that we start using our words in a really weird and unusual way. So there's a great phrase for this used by this Austrian guy called Ludwig Wittgenstein. He said a lot of philosophical problems emerge when language goes on holiday, right? It goes on vacation from everyday life. So it stops being used in the way that we normally use our words. And when we start to use our words in this weird new philosophical way, we sort of kick up the dust

and then we say, oh, it's all terribly confusing. It's all dilemmas and puzzles and paradoxes. And what the ordinary language philosophers are doing is we need to take our language and put it back where it belongs, the kind of way in which we ordinarily use it in our everyday lives. And then once we do that, you'll see that these big philosophical problems just disappear. There is no problem to solve. There you go. You know, this, there's some truth to this. I think, you know, George Carlin used to do a bit back in the day about soft language and how euphemisms can dull or soften reality. He talks about how, you know, when people in, you know, World War I and World War II, when they suffered what we call today PTSD, battle fatigue, we do this thing to soften the language and dull it to a point that it doesn't have that same sort of shock or that same sort of element. And I know that we try and use big words in business.

We try and use buzzwords. You know, everyone wants to talk the latest buzzword, and usually they're just parroting crap. They have no idea what they're talking about. And sometimes we try and take just me saying to you, like, how are you today, to something, I don't know, that sounds like something, I don't know, some philosopher said from Aristotle or something.

How are those? You know what I'm trying to apply here. And I'm not high-minded enough to be able to complex my words clearly. And that's why you're a Rhodes caller and I'm not. But you know what I'm saying? And so I like this concept of like, hey, let's just be straightforward and honest to people and talk in plain language. Our constitution in the U.S., after we dumped you guys over there in England, left you guys behind with that whole Queen King bullshit.

We wrote the constitution in plain language so that everyone can read it. And what's even interesting is most Americans today can't even read at that level. So there's that. So tell us more. Sure. So you've identified one part of it, right? The risks of jargon, the risk of buzzwords is that you just invent your own words and then you try and make them your own. You try and control language that way.

But of course, the kinds of questions we have in philosophy, like, you know, is there really a world out there? Or are we all in a simulation? Can I know anything? Do we have free will? What's the difference between right and wrong? What is justice? What is beauty? These are familiar questions. We may not know the answers, but people sort of ask them anyway. And there's a way of doing them, of answering these questions, where you say, right, our ordinary language is just too basic, it's too simple, we need to invent a fancy new language in which we can articulate these thoughts. And I think these people in Oxford in the 40s and 50s are saying, actually, we don't need a new language, the old language is fine, and there's a simple reason for that, which is basically a kind of version of Darwin and the survival of the fittest how is it that we have the words that we do well the answer is that someone came up with them many

many hundreds of years ago and then they had to deal with life right people had to use these words to talk about their lives talk about their feelings to talk about their experiences and the kinds of words we're going to have today are the words that have survived through centuries and centuries of use. So if you ask yourself, should I use the words that have survived through that Darwinian struggle in language? Or if I just invent a new word one day sitting in my armchair, which one's going to be better? And so there's a guy called J.L. Austin, who's the central figure in this movement. And he says, look, the distinctions that people have needed to make for hundreds of years is going to be better than something i came up with yesterday off the top of my head and so the the focus on trying to go back to ordinary language is saying there's going to

be something good in it that an inventor jargon won't have do you think that uh you know i mean and there's there i think it's right in saying that, you know, we've, we've become really lazy with our language now, like for, from what you said about how, you know, we should use this language that was developed years ago and, and has a beauty to it to where someone like me who just uses the F word every four words to, and you know, you can use the F word for everything. I mean, it's kind of almost lazy thinking when it comes down to it. Do you think?

Yeah. I mean, well, you've been very good today, Chris, so far. So compliments on that. Well, yeah, I think laziness is one way of putting it. So one way of thinking about it is, on the one hand, we've got these words. They're old words. They've come down to us through the generations. So they're going to be doing something right.

That's why they survived. But, of course, one thing that happens is we start to become lazy about them we start attending to what they mean so i mean one of the uh things that was really remarkable about my first few weeks when i was in oxford is where you know i was really anxious and i was trying to impress people using all these big words i knew uh and i was hoping people would be like oh he's really smart he's got all these words and every now and then my the way it works in Oxford, you don't have these big classes or seminars, you just sit in a room with one tutor and you've come there with an essay you've written and my tutor was quite old-fashioned, so you just read it out.

And he'd sort of boil a kettle to make tea while you were reading out your essay and his face would start to go very, very dark while you were reading it. Like, no, like no no no this is going very bad and you're kind of getting nervous more and more nervous and you put down your essay and then the kettle comes to the boil he pours out some tea and then he starts with let's start with your first sentence shall we ah you said the but are you sure you didn't mean uh and that was the kind of level of attention we play every word every little thing and i really mean that thing i said so if you want to find a moral for the kind of philosophy i was taught

it was you've got to pay attention to your own words because you've got to take responsibility for what you're saying you don't get to just throw your words around and make it someone else's job to work out what you what you mean What you mean just is what you say. And so you've got to choose your words correctly. And to do that, you need to really think about what your words are saying and what you're doing with your words. And so, sure, there are times, I suspect, when the F word is probably the best way of getting something across.

There are times when it isn't, when it's getting in the way. And I think what a good education in this kind of philosophy does is to help you to see the difference. There you go. You know, it's interesting how we make things sometimes more complicated than they really need to be. And maybe it's because, I don't know, it looks better, presents better. You know, I remember it seemed like there's always been this problem in business where, you know, the overuse of buzzwords. You know, you'll hear people speak and they'll speak in buzzwords,

and then you're just at the end. You're just like, what the fuck did he just say? I don't know. All I heard was buzzwords. I don't really understand it. Hi, folks. Chris Voss here with a little station break. Hope you're enjoying the show so far.

We'll resume here in a second. I'd like to invite you to come to my coaching, speaking, and training courses website. You can also see our new podcast over there at chrisvossleadershipinstitute.com. Over there, you can find all the different stuff that we do for speaking engagements, if you'd like to hire me, training courses that we offer, and coaching for leadership, management, entrepreneurism, podcasting, corporate stuff, with over 35 years of experience in business and running companies as a CEO. And be sure to check out chrisfossleadershipinstitute.com. Now back to the show.

So you cover some of the people that are the players in this. Tell us a little bit about some of them and some of the, I guess, professors there at Oxford. Sure, happily. So the good place to start the story is with this man called Gilbert Ryle. Now Gilbert Ryle is born in 1900, which is really useful if you're writing a history book when someone's born in a year, that's a nice round number. So he comes to Oxford in 1918, the usual age, and that's really lucky because if he'd been just a tiny bit younger, he would probably have been sent off to fight in the First World War

and died in the trenches. But he doesn't. He survives, he makes it out of school, comes on to college, and there he finds that there's basically no people in the generation above him. Everyone's either very, very young or very, very old. And so he doesn't really get the kind of philosophy that people were doing in the 1910 him. Everyone's either very, very young or very, very old.

And so he doesn't really get the kind of philosophy that people were doing in the 1910s and 1920s because there's no one around to explain it to him. And so he says, right, well, there's no way of finding what that's about. So we need to start from scratch. We just need to start doing philosophy as if we're doing it for the first time. So he gets really impatient with all these old professors saying,

oh, we've got to look to what Plato said and what Aristotle said. And all of philosophy is basically just history. And he says, no, I want to do some thinking for myself. I don't just want to work out what someone thought back in ancient Greece. So he starts to do his work in the 30s and 40s. And a lot of his work is about the thing we're talking about, which is that some of our language confuses us about the nature of reality. There's some really silly examples we can illustrate it.

So I can say something like, Chris is talking to me. I can also say, nobody is talking to me. Now, these two sentences look the same. Wow, that's insulting. Now, these two sentences look the same because they've got X is talking to me. But of course, we know that the word nobody doesn't work the same way as the word chris right there's no there's no person called nobody so if someone then says oh what was it like talking to nobody what did nobody sound like they've clearly misunderstood how this bit of language works right they've misunderstood this bit of language

because it looks a little bit like this other kind of language so this is a silly example no one actually makes that mistake but ryle gets really interested in how we use words like free, how we use words like mind and body. And he thinks there's all these confusions built into how we talk about the mind and body and freedom. And once we start working out how these words actually work, we'll see that these big old problems of, you know, how is the mind different from the body? Do we have free will? They'll just evaporate. They'll just be the product of our misunderstanding our words you know i have people accuse me a lot of time i was talking to this idiot nobody chris voss and uh yeah he's a nobody fuck that dude um and you know in some cases they might be right

depends on what i'm talking about or in the old days it depends on what i was drinking uh so there you go um but as is is it true that you preface, you highlight the area of 1900 to 1960? Was it a golden age of thinking and everything else? One user mentions powerful. He was a forward thinker, truth, free, and mind and body. I think he's referring to one of the gentlemen you mentioned. But was it the golden age of thinking? Yeah, well, not everybody thinks so, but I certainly do.

I don't think I'd have bothered writing a 400-page book about it if I didn't think it was at least a sort of golden age. So I do think it was. I think it was a really exciting period. And one of the reasons is the one I've just mentioned. It's that people thought we've got to do philosophy as if we're doing it for the first time, not just by looking to what people used to say before us. So there's a moment of

independent-minded just doing philosophy. Let's just get on with it. And what happens when they actually start to get on with it? Well, you have, as usually happens, a few schools of thought and they all kind of fight each other for about 60 years so um a good place to start there is with one school of thought which emerges in austria and it's called logical positivism and basically this is really really crude but basically these are people who think a lot of what we say is literally nonsense.

It's meaningless. It doesn't mean anything. It can't be true or false. And this is really controversial because they're saying here are the two kinds of things that aren't nonsense. Logic and math, they're fine. Science, that's fine. Right. We know math is fine and we know that science is fine because we can actually observe science working. It's based on observations. But what about things like talk of God? What about things like religion? What about things like beauty? What about things like right and wrong? So that really big controversial idea is that all that stuff is just meaningless. It's nonsense. And so we should just stop talking about it. Now, I'm very much not on the side of these guys. And what happens in Oxford

is that they hear these ideas coming out of Austria. There's a guy called Freddie Eyre. He goes to Austria in 1935, I think, gets these ideas, comes back to Oxford, is really young, bold, brash, cocky guy, writes a book about it. Everyone's outraged and angry, and then they spend the rest of the decade debating those ideas. Is it really true that ethics is nonsense and religion is nonsense? So what then starts to happen is that you get his big nemesis right aj freddie air um his big enemy and nemesis is a man called jl john langshaw austin and austin's kind of the opposite austin hates these big ideas that are captured in buzzwords which are kind of brash and confident and try and knock

everything down at once he's kind of temperamentally the opposite. He hates big ideas. He thinks that when you have big ideas, they're bound to be wrong. And instead, what he thinks you should do, and his big slogan in everything in life is, piecemeal. Let's take the big questions and then divide them up into lots of little ones. And the way he tries to do is to say, right, let's not try and assume that everything is either meaningful or meaningless, right right what we need is to understand exactly how it is that words mean things and he writes this book um that he gives us a bunch of lectures in harvard in the 50s and it's called how to do things with words and that's why he says the big mistake was to get obsessed with the idea of you know what do words mean and are they meaningful or not

and he says really what we should be asking about is what is it that we do what are the actions we perform with our words and he thinks by thinking of words as something we do things with right um this question of sense and nonsense so forth goes away and instead we start to understand something about human life what are we actually doing when we're calling something right or wrong what are we doing when we're calling it beautiful so it becomes a way of trying to understand ourselves our own minds our own practices better and so these are the two big signs the people who want big brash new ideas are the ones who think we should break it down a piecemeal and attend to what we're really doing and i'm very much on the side of the second there you go uh you know i mean technically i mean to me revisiting stuff

thinking out of the box or trying to think out of the box you know like in business I've applied trying to think out of the box and sometimes you know I would look at systems that I built to my companies and I would be you know I would sit down and go okay let's break this down and sometimes it was a system that I built after serious thought but years later I'd revisit it and go you know why do we do it this way because you know why do we do it this way is a big problem in business because people will be like you'll be like why did somebody build this stupid thing this way and i'm like i don't know it's always been done this way you're like well this is stupid and in

some cases not sometimes it makes sense sometimes it doesn't but i love the theory of philosophy and thinking and science because it runs on theory so it always says this is a theory it seems like a lot of idiots especially in america don't understand the theory concept of science they're like well science must be right on and perfect or or if it's not then all science is bad and you're like no it's it's always runs on theory it's always a developing thing even even the stuff that i think about i'm like i don't know if this is right or wrong but this is my theory and and i'm it's bound to change um and so you know sometimes i would look at stuff that i built or processes that i had and i'd be like this seems stupid there's got to be a better way to do

this and i sit down and look it over and then i'd eventually be reminded of all the reasons why it was done that way and then in the end you go well this makes sense it's kind of like stoicism you know stoicism and and some of these things were written about you know i don't know lots of years ago this is why i'm not a road scholar that's the callback joke of the show um the uh uh you're like you know a bunch of these dudes in roman things that couldn't even buy pants because they're all wearing uh robes hey run around rome eh taking baths and and writing this stuff and you're like how come these guys wrote the core of what the essence is of of almost humanity and you know like no one's written anything better since to a certain degree um and i think questioning all these things and you know maybe throwing them up in the air and

seeing what sticks to the wall and what doesn't and maybe you revisit stuff and go hey you know i think we should always be challenging ideas i think is what my meandering is trying to say yeah can i go back to something you were saying chris this thing about um what it's like what your what your responsibilities are as someone running a business i think that's a really good analogy for some of what these people are trying to do i think they think what goes wrong with philosophy what goes wrong with academia generally and what goes on universities is that you have these people who are really smart and you train them up and then you make them just talk to each other all the time right so they kind of forget how people talk about things when they're not you know in universities when they're when they're not using the special jargon so ordinary the spirit of

ordinary language philosophy is about saying let's try and forget these bad ideas we've got into our heads from spending too long on a university campus and let's try and go back to how we used to use words and so the world of the school child the world of the soldier the world of the businessman these are places where you can't make shit up right you've got to be responsible to someone and someone's going to notice if you lose a war someone's going to notice if you are not delivering profits for your shareholders so you've got responsibilities there so the it seems like it's all really pedantic and boring to kind of focus on your words but the taking your word seriously is just a sign that you're a serious person is that you actually care about getting something right and that's the spirit of science as well you don't just make

things up in science you're trying to get something right and that's why we've got our hypotheses and our experiments and what these philosophers are doing is to say we want the same spirit that we have in business and in science and in war i want to bring it to philosophy we want to be serious about it we want to get something right there you go now you know there are some things that are an objective truth as they say um and and there's some people that don't believe in objective truth nowadays. Do you find that in your research between that period at Oxford, we've had some interesting conversations with people and authors that have been on the show that have talked about what's going on at universities, especially here in America.

Here in America, there seems to be, and this is a theory, but it seems to be very well if you watch interviews on american campuses but there's kind of a group think that goes on now and it's very anti-challenging uh everyone must group think the same thing i'm a moderate democrat but i'm not a fan of the far left uh woke uh end of my party um or the far right for that matter that pushes book burning and you know don't think at all don't read at all but over here in America and I'm not sure if you've had this infection go over there but there anytime someone suggests something over here people throw fits and stick their hands in their ears and and scream la la la and refuse to hear any sort of competing idea that's against the group think

and it seems to be affection that's spread across america and canada from what i understand um do you see a danger in that or or is that a true analogy or theory yeah it's a really hard question chris and it's really hard to kind of come in and say one thing about it. Sure. So one place to just kind of connect it back to some of the things I've just been saying is when we're trying to understand what our words are doing,

one of the things we try to do with our words is to say something true about the world. We're trying to say, well, here's what's going on, here's what's out there. And some people get really worried and so you know what is truth and is there really a truth and is it objective i think some of these worries are simply misplaced i think we genuinely are overthinking some of those questions there are lots of super technical questions about truth and i find them really interesting but i'm not going to uh worry you about them because i don't think they're particularly interesting unless you're sort of in

doing logic but the kinds of things which really do matter I think are is there something that counts as getting it right right I think there's and I think we all understand that there is we know that for the reasons we've mentioned when we're not getting into these really abstract conversations we know the difference between someone telling us the truth and someone lying to us right a used car salesman sells us a car that doesn't work you're going to know that he lied to you and if you know what he's doing in lying to you then you already know what the truth is and the word objective truth is not adding anything interesting you know the difference between truth and a lie so i think that concept is um all that stuff about objectivity is almost always a waste of time and a distraction

but of course there's something else this is is going back to J.L. Austin, who wrote How to Do Things with Words, is that our words aren't just ways of describing the world. Our words are also ways of making things happen within it, right? So, for instance, I can make a promise to you. So if I say something like, I promise I'm going to tell everyone about your great show, Chris. Now, the promise isn't this other thing that's happened yesterday.

I'm not telling you about it. I literally made that promise right now. My words, I promise, literally are the promise. So my word is my action. My action just consists in my saying certain words. So I think a lot of what's going on now is that we've got kind of almost obsessed with the power of language to make things happen just by itself. And that's why a lot of people kind of feel that using words in a certain way can really hurt and harm people. Now, well, some of the time it can, right?

If I suddenly decide I'm not liking this podcast, I'm going to make Chris a death threat. That is a way in which I harm you, right? That's every Friday around here. Yeah, and I'm sure you'd be the first to say, you're, big fan of death threats. They fill your

life with fear and worry and concern and nuisance and bother. So, I think the question here about campuses and so forth is, how do we tell the difference between the kinds of things we do with our words that's basically just harmless, it's about exploring, trying out ideas,

debating, and the kinds of things which actually cause people harm. And I think the people you're accusing of kind of going too far to the left are people who I think have a slightly excessive picture of how words by themselves can cause harm. And I think the way to fight back against it is say, hang on a second. Sure, sometimes you can speak of things like verbal violence, maybe that's a thing, but it's really important that it's not the same sort of thing as real physical violence right um so what this tradition i think helps us to do is to say just because we can do things with words doesn't mean that the things we do with words are just the same kind of thing that we do with our fists the different sorts of things and we shouldn't overstate the

kinds of harms that words can do man you said that in the most logical way. I mean, and it makes sense. You know, we have the issue over here is we have the feels of reals. And somehow we've moved from a logical and reasoning society to an emotionalism society, is my theory. And so we have people that, you know, at work, work, you know, Oh, Oh, someone looked at me the wrong way. So now I have a microaggression. I need to run to HR and file a complaint because I, you know, someone hurt my feelings basically. And, and you said it, you stated in a very logical

way that, that makes sense. Um, I'll put it in a more, uh, layman's term for someone who flunked second grade. That's a callback joke. I didn't really flunk second grade. I just want people to know that. Do you have tests in second grade? I don't know. It's a joke I made at one time. But don't write me, people.

My second grade teacher is going to be like, I didn't flunk you, damn it. What the hell? That'll be in the New York Times next week. Chris Foss lied. to be like i didn't flunk you damn it what the hell that'll be in the new york times next week um chris voslade uh but no uh it's it's it's it's the the words hurt their feelings and so we can't debate ideas like you see these shouting down of professors and and idea things and it used to be it seems like in in the old world that they would have debates, you know, like I love the old debates, James Baldwin being at the big debate thing. I think it was at Harvard or someplace, you know, those big debates they would have. And, you know, people would share ideas and try and be respectful to each other and at least listen to each other and go, well, maybe you might change my thing. But it seems like now things have really changed.

And so maybe we need to get back to the 1900s and 1960s, from what you've talked about in your book, to be able to kick those ideas around more without worrying about your feelings. I don't know. One of the things that I think I like

about philosophy is that all the philosophy, any good philosophy, I think, is going to be about things that really matter to people. Not just matter to philosophers, matter to everybody. Right. But the way in which philosophers talk about them won't be to jump straight into the thing that's controversial, the thing that's getting people angry. It's going to say, well, hang on a second. The reason why there's a controversy here is because we're making this basic assumption and that assumption will actually be terribly abstract and removed from life but that's where the real action is and i think the way in which philosophy can can have both at once it can both kind of get people thinking about the important stuff and it can also uh drive temperatures down and say you know stop being so angry everybody is by saying let's not debate the thing that we think we're debating let's debate the thing that we think we're debating.

Let's debate the thing behind it, the really basic assumption, the premise. And all of these really abstract questions about the nature of language and freedom and so forth, it's not the kind of thing that comes up by itself in everyday life, but it's behind it. And the sign of a philosopher, I think, the kind of thing that tells you when you're talking to a kid in high school, the thing that makes you think this kid could be a philosopher is when they'll ask why. They'll kind of spot the assumption you're making.

And then they'll say, hang on a second, but why do we assume that? And then we say, oh, we assume that because X. And they say, but why do we assume that? And once you've asked that question twice, you're going to be asking something incredibly abstract and general, but that's really where the intellectual action is. There you go. So I think I like doing that. I like getting my students who are really angry about something and saying, right, here's what I think this is really about.

Why don't we talk about that thing? And because it's so abstract, it's hard to get really, really angry because you'd sound mad if you did. But on the other hand, you are talking about the thing that really matters. There you go you know maybe that's the thing we need to preface everything in a logical reasonable conversation with first is like look if you're if you're feeling emotions you're getting angry about something you're you're blocking your ability to process that logic and reason and therefore it's clouding your view of what logic and reason is. But there's a lot of people that I think they're really far against logic and reason.

Some people will attack it as a patriarchy. Some people will make it all about their feelings. We really have feelings culture going on over here. I think we need to return to maybe some of the things you've written in your book. Yeah, I mean, just that stuff about it. I mean, it's worth saying there's a quite simple way of responding to some of these sorts of claims. If they say things like, we shouldn't have logic and reason because it's patriarchal. Well, that kind of is using logic and reason, right? You've given a reason for why we should object to reason. And once you're in the game of trying to give

reasons for things, I think it's too late for you to dismiss logic because you're in the game of trying to give reasons for things i think it's too late for you to dismiss logic because you're already doing it you're already in the game of giving reasons and once you're in that game you've got to play that game by the rules and those rules are the rules of logic so i think those sorts of things um are pretty easy to to get around i think what's harder is what you're mentioning uh immediately after that when people won't even play the game of giving reasons that's much harder yeah and i think that's been true from the beginning of pretty much western civilization um from the time of you know socrates and plato and aristotle the big challenge is not trying to persuade someone logically once they're already kind of debating something rationally with

you it's how do you get them to see that debating something uh rationally might be the way to go in the first place? And on that one, I'm not sure I do have a solution. I don't think the solution is more arguments. Well, the whole point here is that that person isn't being moved by argument. So giving more arguments isn't going to help. So what you need, I think, is something else, something that transforms our emotions themselves. So we become receptive to things like reasoning. And that's something that can't itself be done by magic with one argument.

It's something that you do by creating a culture of calm and dispassionate conversation. And you can't create that by yourself. You can't make that happen in a day. It's the task of many, many hundreds of years of setting up institutions that will turn people into the kind of people who like to have logical debates. There you go. You know, we saw a recent thing here a few months ago, I think it was. It was, I believe, the New York University where a professor who had invited the speaker shouted down the speaker.

And I think you bring up a good point. You know, we need to be able to say, hey, let's debate these ideas. One of our listeners, Matthew Fulton, is mentioning, I wish people could view politics from a philosophical perspective. It requires you to enter with an open mind. You know, right now, we have some issues here in our country. I think you guys do over there with Brexit. I saw a recent calling out of Brexit again, and whether or not it's worked or not.

You know, we have these political issues and we have this thing that really has been developed especially with social media um and you back in the oxford days of 1900 1960s you're covering your book and these thinkers they didn't have social media so they didn't have this algorithmic confirmation bias that was being fed to them like yeah my idea must be right because some 400 pound guy in his basement uh lives with his mom and is as a virgin at 35 uh has agreed with me so clearly i'm right yeah you should you know make fun of people who are virgins at 35 that's a bit rude of you oh but um i've lost particularly talking about yes indeed

yeah well i suppose um just trying to tie this back to what was different about the 1950s well oddly enough you usually tell the opposite story the kind of story people normally tell is that you know the 50s were really horrible you know what was horrible about the 50s is that we didn't have um fast digital communication we didn't have easy means of transport to get across the world. So that meant that you were really stuck in your village with a bunch of people who looked like you, ate like you, spoke like you, and never exposed to ideas from outside that little bubble,

as we now call it. And now that we've got the kind of big public international town square that is social media, we're all in a position to be able to expose to a wider range of perspectives so that's the standard story and for a time i think people were really optimistic about that they thought that the internet and communication was going to transform us by uh opening us up onto new perspectives i think what it has shown is that we were being over optimistic there it's not as easy as that it's not just a matter of once we get loads of people talking then we'll all become terribly open-minded.

That doesn't happen. What can happen is precisely the opposite. Because there's so much noise in the public square, we tend to retreat in on ourselves. I can't handle it. It's really hard, right? And that's just human. It's hard to deal with a situation where everyone around you

is doing something different and everyone hates everybody else. That's not an easy life to live. So I think I have some sympathy for the people you're describing on campuses the reason why we become more attached to our feelings is because we don't have the kind of stable social order in which we can have conversations but within a set of conventions and rules that tell us how they happen once the rules are off and anything goes, it's just very, very hard for us to be able to keep our composure. So, you know, I have some sympathy for it, just to play devil's advocate for what I myself was saying a moment ago. So I don't have a solution to that, by the way, but perhaps one place to start is to say, is there something we could do to make social media

slightly less like a completely unregulated, wild town square when anything goes and anyone can talk and the person who's loudest gets to speak is there some way of having the kinds of constraints um that you have in say the courts of law right not anyone can say anything they like what you have in the sciences institutions of peer review so not any old idiot can go and publish a paper in a medical journal thank goodness for that? So we've got ways of regulating, controlling speech so that the best, most truthful, most accurate views rise to the top. And we need to find some way in which you can do that in these more unregulated kinds of social media.

There you go. Perfectly said. You know, some people say, you know, the algorithms seem to change because the algorithms target the dopamine of emotion, reaction of emotion and that confirmation bias you know uh you maybe kind of have an epiphany too you talked about how you know we used to be you know sometimes small villages where we didn't have outside thinking so everyone kind of group thought and then you know now we've reached this point where there's so many carnival barkers in the town square that there's just an insanity of ideas there what there used

to be a midpoint where we had a sort of reasonable uh kind of rules on shame and and ethics and and a certain i don't want to say morality because then people start bringing religion in there was certain rules that we had where we knew where we knew human nature to a certain degree and we knew that if we let certain people do certain things that shit would get out of hand and that well this person's freedom was great if this person freed freedom you know you go yeah you should let him run free and do whatever the fuck he wants you know then you get uh you know uh hitler you know you get you have bad shit and then the community ends up having to clean that up if you really study tribal dynamics one of the reasons that we had a lot of shaming and we had a lot of rules in society that you know kind of

get thrown out we had those rules because we understood that if one person in the tribe decided to be an asshole it wasn't just him being an asshole and suffering the consequences. The community would suffer the consequences as a whole. And there was kind of a midpoint where if we had the town asshole, the town crazy, we just put him in a rubber room and fed him some drugs. And we used to have institutions, especially here in America, before Reagan, where we just put people away

and be like, that person's fucko. Or if there's one or two of these, you know, these batshit people screaming in the town square, everyone would be like, hey, the guy with the cardboard signs the nut job, right? Well, somehow the internet made it so all the nut jobs can connect with each other after they've been thrown out of the 10th square and everybody just looks at them. And you bring up a good point that's given me an epiphany. You know, we kind of almost have this problem with choice overload with the internet where there's too many carnival barkers

and it's a madhouse and people just can't fucking find objective truth anymore. I don't know. Yeah, I think, can i go back to something you said at the start of that which i thought was oh that was a great use of uh the word epiphany by the way uh that seems like a road scholar word uh maybe you should be allowed to go i'll go apply i think what you said about shame was really useful there um and i think we can sort of take

that apart in two ways. So one thing you were describing here was a practice of people shaming other people, sort of saying, look, you're the nutjob, we don't need you among us. And I think a lot of people are going to hear that and saying, ooh, that sounds a bit scary to me. Who gets to say who the nutjob is? You know, Socrates back in the day, people thought he was a nutjob. But, you know, we don't think that anymore.

And they killed him. Well, indeed. Well, indeed. people thought he was a nut job but you know we don't think that anymore and they killed him well indeed well indeed and i think we've had uh two thousand and more years in which to regret that that killing um but i think what i was more interested in is uh shame that comes from within right well it's not something you do to other people it's not like you're kind of calling them out in public and um being nasty to them excluding them, but rather thinking of shame as a kind of feeling you have when you're falling short of your own highest ideals. So lots of people are really suspicious of this idea of shame, they're suspicious of ideas of honour. I think they're really useful ideas. I think properly understood, they're pretty much at the heart of what you were trying not to say, which is morality.

So even if you can have whatever you want on religion, and I'm not bringing that in, if you don't want that. But the idea is that we all have this picture of what we're actually like every day, and this kind of slightly higher picture we have of what we could be. And I think shame is the feeling you have when you fail to live up to your own vision of what you could be. I think that's basically what shame is. And some people think, oh, but if you're constantly feeling shame, that means you're obsessed with the opinion of others, and you're not independent minded enough. And I just don't think that's true. I think it's a mistake for people to try to be entirely autonomous and thinking all that matters is whether I meet my own standards. I think it really does matter that you're trying to live in a community with other people. And if other people think you're a nutjob, they could be wrong. Of course,

they could be wrong. But you might want to take a long, hard look at yourself and say, why is it that it's like, you know, you're the one going the wrong way down one way and kind of saying, why is everyone driving the wrong way? Well, it's likely that you're the one who's getting it wrong. So perhaps one good thing about social media is that it allows people to hear that voice back. You don't just get your own prejudices fed back to you. You get other people who kind of show you up in a different light. And what that gives you, I think, is self-awareness.

You start to become a little bit more self-conscious about what you're saying, what you're doing. And in general, I think self-awareness is pretty much where the rest of morality starts, when you start to see yourself in the way that other people see you. There you go. You know, it's really interesting. I love the discussion we're having.

Someone has put something up. It's Matthew again. He's a good friend of mine. And he talks about how we need to change the narrative away from arguments to being involved in a conversation. Let me play devil's advocate to that because um you know i'm familiar with times where i've tried to have uh and we'll throw politics out as a thing um or or any any given subject um how you know you wrote about these people that had these discussions and philosophy and back and forth and debates and stuff what what is the premise for you know these guys were all really smart people or i assume they

were smart people right uh they certainly worked hard at trying to be smart and maybe open-minded um but what what is the thing so you know let's we'll just throw out a thing here that's real popular trope that i run into uh one of the things we love to do in our in a political sphere over here we have this thing called the constitution and uh we we weren't in that whole king queen thing uh you may have heard of it and uh uh and so we have people that run around in our society over here uh and they quote the constitution and they'll they'll be the constitution says this now if you read the constitution you know most times you don't run around quoting it because you know it is what it is um but nine times out of ten anybody who's running around

going the constitution says this has never read the document clearly and so sometimes you get in these arguments with people and for me it's political uh sometimes i imagine it would be in your world of philosophy and thought uh should you argue or try and have debate or try and have some sort of conversation with people who clearly haven't even fucking educated themselves on a basic level to a point that you can have a conversation over debate is there a certain level of yeah you know if you're if you're fucking crazy like we have this q anon over here which is complete batshit and if you have if you're talking about somebody who's batshit drilling

out the side of their mouth i'm being an asshole of course when i say that but i mean have you seen me on wednesdays um the uh is it really worthy a debate of those people? I don't know. Yeah, I think this is really interesting. I mean, I have various boring things to say, but the same sort of thing you'll get if you ask anybody. So I'll try and say something with my philosopher's hat on. Yes, put your road scorer on.

Yeah, so the distinction your friend Matthew drew between debates on the one hand and conversation, sorry, arguments on the one hand and conversation on the other. And in general, I think that's a really useful thing to say. Not everything in life should be an argument. It's really exhausting if everything turns into an argument where an argument means a sort of disagreement. Can you tell that to my wife? Even if you think of argument as something less kind of violent than that. So if you think of arguments as the kind of thing you mean when you're doing logic 101, right?

So you're saying this, therefore this, therefore this, therefore this. It's a kind of chain of reasoning. That's the kind of philosopher sense of argument. Even that can be a bit relentless. If someone spoke to you like that all the time, constantly just throwing reasons at you, I you know that's that's um not a recipe for a good relationship with anybody um so then you ask yourself well the other end well what's a conversation then what's a conversation if it's not just giving reasons for what we're saying well one thing i think that's really important about how conversations actually go is that they

don't involve me telling you something you didn't know you telling me something i didn't sometimes it does if this kind of podcast is designed to be the kind of place where I try and tell you and your listeners things they didn't already know. But sometimes some of the things I'm saying, at least, are not new information. What they are is a bit more like, come on, the two of us, we're not kind of looking at each other

and hurling arguments. What we're doing is saying, why don't we just sort of turn away and look at the same thing together, right? So it's a bit like you look at the window and say, oh, see that and someone says yes i'm not blind well that's a silly response right because a lot of what we're doing in our life is kind of reminding each other that we inhabit a shared world and we're trying to think are you looking at the same things that i'm looking at um so i think what's going on when we turn a debate into a conversation is we stop thinking of everyone else as people to persuade people people whose minds need to be changed, but rather you think of people with whom we share

a world. And what conversation that involves is us kind of pointing little bits of the world and trying to say, look, we're in the same place together and we're looking at the same things. So there's a slightly more technical point. This is from an American philosopher. This is really great, great, great writer, really weird guy called David Lewis. And he wrote an essay sometime in I think the 70s called scorekeeping in a language game, right? And it's a kind of theory of conversations and how they work. And roughly the idea is that there's, you can imagine whenever we're having a conversation, just like in a a baseball game or indeed any game there's a kind of scoreboard an imaginary scoreboard in the background every time i say something new it's like i'm updating the score in the conversation and the thing that i say then becomes part of our common ground our

shared assumptions we just sort of take that for granted every now and then i'll say something really really controversial right i'll say something really, really controversial, right? I'll say something like, so as you agree with me, Chris, we should probably need to bring back a king and queen to America, and then you'll carry on. Whoa, whoa, whoa. I didn't agree to that. I didn't agree to that.

So that's a moment when what you're saying is that's not common ground, right? You've tried to update the score without having actually scored the run that entitles you to update it. So I think bad arguments arguments bad conversations are happening when people don't earn their right to add something to the common ground and good conversations happen when we sort of say are you happy with my introducing this new assumption you say yep i'm happy with that and then we carry on and what makes that a kind of fruitful or productive way of going about things is that at each stage, it's not just me and you kind of hurling things at each other from two sides of a net. It's rather we're kind of cooperating towards building something together.

It's really rare. It's unusual for this to happen in its really pure and perfect form. But I do think that's the idea we're trying to go for, right? An ideal of accountability to each other. There you go. And accountability to each other. There you go. An accountability to each other. I like that concept. We had an author on years ago who she worked for several people that ran for president here in America, Fred Durst.

He wrote a book called Making Conversation elements of meaningful communication and i like what you said where instead of looking at each other like you know me looking at you right now going us you know me versus you we we we take an aside and we go let's look at the concept so you know maybe in our example i use the constitution so instead of me trying to change your mind let's objectively look at the constitution you know i'll have people that will say something about a politician i'll be like really that's the assumption you made and and here here in america i don't know what's going on other countries clearly because i i you know america is the only thing that matters clearly um the asshole american effect there joke um the uh i like your your i like your pilot like

you know whatever dude uh very good um very stoic um the uh but but one of the things we have here is this meme world and so we have these people that they they take in their information with memes and you know some idiot meme that some you know once again back to the the the 35 year old virgin if you're a 35 year old virgin good for you and but i'm just saying you might be one of those people uh one of those people wow that was judgy um but you know you they they take in their information that way and they don't have an educated thing like all people would be critical of politician over another politician. I'll be like,

have you ever spent hours listening to what both those politicians saying and objectively seeing their use of language and words and, and how they operate and, and, and, and gone, you know, this person clearly is dumber than the other person.

And yet you won't, you'll be like, I don't know. I saw like a 32nd blip meme on Tik TOKok and therefore i describe all my ideas to that um the other there's another thing you bring up too that uh someone hasn't earned their place in the debate is is that what i'm talking about when i say that if someone hasn't just educated themselves enough like should i be arguing with someone who hasn't read the constitution because i mean yeah i could sit with them like you've said you know and take an aside and go let's talk about the constitution let's read it together eh i don't know yeah i mean it's a

question of of what the ideal would be if the conversation went right but then there's the more realistic question of do we think that's actually going to happen right so a lot of philosophy i think just by its nature it's got to make some assumptions. It's got to imagine that this person you're imagining you're arguing with is actually receptive to your reasons, is rational, is able to follow a complex chain of reasoning and so forth. Realistically, most of us, even those of us who are kind of good at this stuff, we're not always equally good at it. Sometimes we're tired. Sometimes we're bored. So we've got to distinguish between what a conversation would go like if everyone brought their A game to it and what it's actually like when we're all flawed. We're vulnerable.

We sometimes say silly things. Sometimes we get really worried about being humiliated and losing face. And so we say stupid things. So these are all realistic things that that happen and i think if we're trying to apply some of these insights about conversation and debate and logic and objectivity and so forth i think we've got to keep in mind the fact that life is never or virtually never going to be like the perfect ideal so the ideal then is not there to be something you kind of use to hit other people in the head with we're always failing it's just you know human life we're always failing by our own standards that's just normal but i think what we want is to think of it as something we hold ourselves up to and say right look i failed this time i didn't manage to to be as rational and

logical and objective and reasoned and evidence-based as i wanted to be but it doesn't mean that i can't do it better next time. You know that old motto, try again, fail better. And things like rationality, objectivity, I think that's the spirit in which we hold them as ideals. We just sort of keep trying and then fail better the next time. There you go.

There you go. I grew up in a cult. I grew up with a brainwashing of a cult religion. And I was the guy who was always like, why do we do it this way? And then you shut up and just have faith, stupid. And so I approach the world from that aspect where I'm constantly going, why do people do things? What makes them operate and tick?

And then, of course, trying to have meaningful conversations. So hopefully some of that mindset can come out of your book and seeing representation of other people having great discussions on philosophy and maybe we can change the world in the future or forward. The one thing man can learn from his past is that man never learns from his past. So he should work on that some more.

Any final thoughts before we go out? Well, what I'd like, I think, whether people read my book or not, I'm not so worried about. Don't let my publishers know I said that. Read his book, Dan. What I would like is for people to get into their heads that philosophy has something to say to them. So it doesn't really matter what bit of philosophy you read. You want to pick up some Aristotle or Plato or some Descartes,

be my guest. But I think all our lives are going to be enriched if we just have that little bit of self awareness, self consciousness, that sense of how can we draw attention to some of the assumptions we never think about. I think it's just a better life when we have that kind of self consciousness. And I hope anyone

listening to the conversation goes away feeling, yeah, I should do a bit more of that. And isn't that a bit of self-consciousness and i hope anyone listening to the conversation goes away feeling yeah i should do a bit more of that there you go and isn't that a bit of self-accountability to be self-conscious yeah i think it's exactly that i think it's exactly that it's it's that not letting yourself down you can be better than this you are this wonderful thing a rational human being try to be that more often there you go well we need more self-accountability in this world definitely awesome uh thank you very much for coming the show we really appreciate it man be that more often. There you go. Well, we need more self-accountability in this world. Definitely. Awesome. Thank you very much for coming to the show. We really appreciate it, man. Great. Thanks very much for having me, Chris.

There you go. And give us a.com wherever you want people to find you on the interwebs, maybe, or just plug the book. Yeah, that would be my website, NikhilKrishnan.org, and my book is called Terribly Serious Adventure, Philosophy and War at Oxford, 1900 to 1960

published by Random House. There you go. Out July 4th, 2023. Thank you very much for coming on the show. Thanks for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com, fortuneschristfoss, youtube.com,

fortuneschristfoss, linkedin.com, fortuneschristfoss, and all those crazy places that we are on the internet. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe and be self

accountable, damn it. Maybe I'm going to start ending the show that way. And we'll see you next time. Bye-bye.