TrueLife - Simon Critchley - Inside the Mind of a Genius

Episode Date: March 4, 2022

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Darkness struck, a gut-punched theft, Sun ripped away, her health bereft. I roar at the void. This ain't just fate, a cosmic scam I spit my hate. The games rigged tight, shadows deal, blood on their hands, I'll never kneel. Yet in the rage, a crack ignites, occulted sparks cut through the nights. The scar's my key, hermetic and stark. To see, to rise, I hunt in the dark. fumbling, furious through ruins maze, lights my war cry, born from the blaze.

The poem is Angels with Rifles. The track, I Am Sorrow, I Am Lust by Kodak Serafini. Check out the entire song at the end of the cast. Good morning, my friends. I hope your day is beautiful. I have the long-awaited Simon Critchley interview coming right to you. However, I must tell. you that due to a poor decision on my end, I had a little bit of microphone problems, so I had to use my backup microphone.

At times, it might be a little breathy. However, I can tell you that the wisdom of Simon Critchley shines through. This may be the most important philosopher of our time. He's definitely one of my favorites. I know you'll enjoy this. So thank you for your patience. Look forward to hearing everything. you have to say about it. Aloha. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the True Life podcast. We are currently awaiting one of the greatest philosophers

of our time, I believe, Mr. Simon Critchley, who will be joining us shortly. I wanted to give you guys a kind of an overview of the book that he's got here. The book is called Ball, and it is a 35 philosophical shortcuts. Awesome.

So, ladies and gentlemen, I am here with the one and only Simon Critchley. He is an amazing philosopher. He's the, the moderator of the Stone Column at the New York Times, author of numerous books from the Greek tragedies to David Bowie, the Hans Jonas Professor at the New School in New York. And today we're going to be checking out his new book right here called Bald, which, you know what I really like about it? Just from the beginning, it's got an awesome cover, but then you take off the dust jacket and it's actually bald. There's nothing on there. It's a bold book. Yeah, completely. Absolutely hairless object.

Yeah, that's cool. Nice. Really well done. I think most people confuse in the beginning. You know, it says bald and apparently you sir have no hair, which is what most people think the book is about. But in reality, it's more about being frank. Can you talk a little bit about what made you decide to write this book or put it

together, I should say? Well, yeah. I mean, it's been written over the last years, really. And the conceit of me as a funny one. One hand, I am bald. On the other hand, I try and speak in this book in a very blunt, straightforward way. So it's an attempt to speak without a wig or a toupee, a scholastic, attempt to kind of speak directly. Also that I was forced to, I learned to speak more baldly working in the newspaper and the way I did.

So it's, so it's bald. in fact as a hook and then the idea about being speaking broadly speaking plainly clearly about matters

which are complex matters I think they can be addressed straightforwardly and can be accessible to a general reader and I think that that's often seems like an easier thing to do it's actually a hard

for someone like me yeah I agree do you think that I wish more people would speak candidly. It seems to me that that's a pretty big issue in our world today, is whether it's because people don't want to hurt other people's feelings or that maybe they don't thoroughly understand, but we tend to gloss over or use language that's so ambiguous. It's a miracle that we can actually communicate with each other sometimes. Indeed. Yeah. I try and, I mean, my belief since I was a student, really, it was an awful long time ago,

was that philosophy could be, philosophy is understandable to people with an interest in it. And it's the requirement on philosophy is to make itself heard in the public realm in clear and distinct ways. And that's what I try and do. It's an attempt to kind of not, not hide things away to speak directly and frankly and honestly about things which I think are of great importance to, not just to me, but hopefully to other people. Yeah, one thing I find really refreshing about your work is the way that you argue from philosophy in that, like not all things, but only part of life is intelligible. And you say in your other book from the Greek tragedies, you know, we can only know what we can know. And so much, it seems to me that there's a lot of philosophy professionals that believe in something different than the style you argue from.

Can you tell people a little bit about the style in which you come from philosophy? Well, yeah, I mean, it's, I think that the, strangely enough, I mean, the purpose of me is to invest people of their illusions and their illusions about things. People have, people have huge ideas, huge theories about history, about what's going on, about the nature of the universe, and philosophy is, should set out to kind of question those to disappoint people. And so I see philosophy as a kind of a sobering activity that actually we know a lot less than we think we know.

And that's, hey, the philosophical tradition, I guess, I'm born is, you know, I did philosophy at a provincial university in and then got very interested in what was going on in France, Germany, and I learned those languages, studied what was called philosophy. which is much more with philosophy in the English-speaking world is dominated by what's called the analytic tradition, which is all fine and good, some very clever people there, done one thing, but it's often far limited to limited-is-cope, that philosophy is something which takes place within academic departments, addresses other academics, and is a discipline which is kind of, it's more closely linked to the sciences, to the empirical sciences and to logic.

And the approach to philosophy that I'd take is much more directly connected with culture, with the life that people live, the way people think. And philosophy has to address the conditions of its time and place, the time and place of its emergence, and to take account of audience and all of those things. And in this case, that means addressing an audience, audience of people that say read the New York Times and trying to kind of go that really quite interesting insights can be formulated in ways that are intelligible to. a newspaper reader and nothing is really nothing huge is lost in that

translation and a lot is so yeah so I mean I've got I don't know I've got odd sets of interests so I've got an interest in I come out of this with a whole range of thinkers people like hate

and and also I've got very kind of broad interest for me it's what I do as a philosopher is connected to the music I listen to the sport I watch, what I think about the people I meet and talk to. So it's kind of everything, kind of it touches on all sorts of aspects of life. Nothing should be alien to a philosophical disposition in my view. And it should be out there in the culture and in the way people think

about things as being enclosed in an ivory tower. I like that. Yeah. It seems to me like there's been a, like a huge problem with explanation over experience. And sometimes people that are in the ivory tower or that are locked in education their whole life, they're learning from a guy who learned from a guy who learned from a guy. Whereas if you're out there playing soccer, if you're out there like yourself playing in a band and maybe having a good time and having experiences in life, you get to see things from different points of view. And it seems that that is where you can start connecting all the different philosophies together. I was a trusting experience, trusting, you know, not being, I'm not a skeptic.

You know, I'm not really a skeptic by disposition. So if somebody tells me something, I'm inclined to believe it and then try and understand that experience. So, and that means that the scope of philosophy for me is very, very broad. It certainly includes what you used to care about. And kind of philosophers or what I, you know, you mentioned in your email. Dick, who's normally seen as a sci-fi writer, but he was a great philosophical interest.

He was a garage philosopher. He was an album, and that's good. I'm all in favor of that. He's such an interesting guy that was out of his garage and just coming up with these ideas that most people would be jealous of. I mean, sometimes the ideas that are so far out there are the ideas that we can learn so much from,

which it brings me to a point in your book for the first time I had started thinking about this. First time, the way, you write is amazing to me. You're able to pack a lot of information into a short, sweet essay that allows people to think in different ways. And one of the first essays you wrote was talking about the Athenians and how the people they conquered wanted hope and the difference between hope and faith. And I believe that was in one of the, like the third essay there where the Athenians, they are going to attack the, am I going to pronounce this right?

The Millions? Millions, that's right. The millions. And could you maybe just tell people a little bit about your ideas of hope and how it can lead to hopelessness? Yeah, this was an essay that was written in, was published on, I think, Easter Sunday, 2014. So I was using that as a way of attacking tears of hope. And at that time, in those distant days when Barack Obama, and we were still an idea of the audacity of hope,

and it seems an awful long time ago now, I was trying to kind of press that idea of hope and use this story, which is a lucidity, who's one of the two great historians of Greece, the history of the Peloponis Wars, and he tells the story of the Athenians, they show up on an island, and they have a very simple message.

They say, it was or we will kill you. And they decide, they try to prevaric, like some kind of delay and say, we're going to talk, Athenians don't, they talk to the Mellian

their governors. And they, governors play for time, and they, Athenians, eventually the Athenians, and they, they kill all of the,

male citizens and they enslave the women and children, as was the custom in the ancient world. And one of the things that the Athenians say to the Millions is that you seem to, the millions say we can still hope for things. We can hope that this will end up well. Hope for the Athenians is prodigal. Once you go down that road, you're never going to be done. Hope in the view that I argue in this essay is by clinging to hope, we often. make suffering worth, replace the idea of hope with an idea of courage, which is what I try to do in the essay. And there's a lot, really, God, the first point you make, it's, I like hiding things. So in writing, I like to have things underneath the surface, which if you're,

some people will know all the illusions, references I'm making, there are things going on, but you don't need to know anything about that. So it gives me enormous pleasure to kind of give the appearance or something pretty simple and straightforward and there's all sorts of things, more tangled things going on beneath the service. But I think hope is a

potentially politically, really questionable idea. And it's often refusing to face up to reality. And we would do better to face up to reality courageously run away from reality with some idea of hope

I'm up to in that piece. Yeah, it's such a fascinating thing to think about. To me, hope seems like a stripper that works the day shift. Like, she's just, it's so sad in so many ways, but so many people cling to it. And it seems that that's the one thing they have. But it's such a, I hope this isn't horrible to say, but it seems like such a weak thing to hold on to when you're so, I believe people are so much stronger than they give themselves credit for. And instead of clinging to hope, if they would cling to, I'm not sure belief is much better, but maybe if they could cling to something.

I'm not sure what they could cling to, but it just seems to me that hope, I believe you used the reference later in the book as a read. Like we are like reads and just kind of bending in the wind. Yeah, we're reads. We're the weakest read in nature. It's Pascal. We can be wiped away with a, this,

I wrote this, one of the last, that's the last piece in the book, which has written during April 2020 when the coronavirus was really bad in New York. So it was a, that and the idea that we can be, the idea of human beings as these kind of strong, rational masters of the universe, no, we're weak reeds that can be blown away with a, with a virus, and everything can fall apart. And, but our strengths consist in that weakness, right?

It's, there's a great virtue to that. So believing yourself strong when you're not, is actually real strength consistent, accepting your weakness and impressing. embracing it and embracing it in thought line that Pascal says is that dignity consists in thinking, right? And we think in that weakness, which is the weakness of the human condition, and we should strive to think well and not to ourselves. So in regard to hope, in place of hope, I think we become a really historically informed realism. So if we're thinking about situations, say for example, what's going on in Ukraine right now, to understand that, we need a historical understanding of that part of the world and its history and the complexity of that situation before we immediately run to a response

and say, this person is evil, this person is good, we should look for this, and we should condemn that. It's always more complicated than that. Yeah, I could not agree. anymore. And it seems criminal to me that we have really intelligent people that utilize media or maybe the lack of education of some people to simplify things. Like, everybody should know that things are much more complicated than we're being told. And it saddens me to think that people turn to hope. And it kind of begs the question, like, when we were speaking

about the audacity of hope. And Barack Obama is such a beautiful speaker. And the rhetoric that he used, in order to get people to think things was magnificent in how he did it. I don't agree with that, but philosophical standpoint, doesn't it seem almost criminal that people so smart can use rhetoric to change the behavior of such mass amounts of people

to do horrible things? Yeah, I think I wrote a piece, I got into terrible trouble for this in 2008 called Barack Obama and the American Void. Braga Baja in Harper's magazine and it was it wasn't an attack

on Obama it was an attempt to understand him and that's why I read I read all of his autobiographical right

there was already a lot to read now there's a lot more he had the extraordinary ability of appearing to be something that people

wanted so he could to liberals he would appear liberals for more conservatives he would appear people

that were concerned with, let's say, the politics of race, he could appear to be concerned with the politics of race. He was kind of like a mirror that reflected. He reflected about what people wanted to see. And that's brilliant when you're with such soaring rhetoric. What was at the heart of that was something deeply empty. And he was doing that for, let's say, understandable reasons in the sense in which in the context of Bush II, there was another, again, this seems terribly kind of old-fashioned to think these terms, but the kind of division that was experienced in the early, after 9-11 and the campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq had led to this real beginning of a divisiveness in the United States.

And Obama was offering a kind of a barn to kind of heal that. And it worked, it worked. But it doesn't mean that we should, but if that hope is just a kind of, a kind of, a nice thing to say that couples over the same operations of power, let's say the same foreign policy, the same drone strikes, the same use political assassination of the rest, then I think there's a we can accuse him of being hypocritical to say the least. So I don't know whether, I think, if you think of someone like utilities, it's actually quite bleak, right? There is human affairs always going to be defined by conflict.

and the attempt to tell lies and foster illusions. And all we can do really is to try and point that out and to try and take people with us. And is that going to produce the kind of change that is often talked about politically? No. I don't think that such a thing is possible. So I think I'm a little bit of a realist

and a pessimist and a skeptic when it comes to political talk and political. On whichever side, actually. Yeah, I agree. I think it's fascinating to think about. And I wonder what Thucydides would say today about what he might, if he was telling the story today about the story he told about the Peloponnesian one, I would think he would be telling the Ukrainians the same thing. Like there's, I don't know, I often wonder what it would, if the time of Thucydides and the wars that happened are no different than the wars that are happening now. And it seems to me that. human conflict, as you said, is something that is always with us, and it's so devastating. But it seems to be the one thing that propels us forward at the end. Would you agree with that? Yeah. I mean, war is the, you know, is the kind of, in a way, the mother of invention and even philosophical invention, it's a, you can plot philosophy in relationship to war. War is,

but one thing I'd say would be, I remember that there was a wonderful, I mean, one of the people I don't know, but I was really happy to endorse the book, was the terrorists and the parliamentarian who does some wonderful movies, but one movie must be around 2004 was the fog of war. And the fog of war was, it was a long interview, and he has a very particular kind of interview technique and even camera technique, which is really good, was with McNamara, who was a Defense Secretary or Secretary of the under Nixon and then the Johnson in the American

involvement in Vietnam and was seen on the left as the great evil figure the great Satan of the America's involvement in Vietnam. Okay so but Mara has just interviewed and he's asked he's asked question he's a very intelligent man

and he says the first rule with war is very sympathy with the enemy sympathy with the enemy sympathy with the enemy. And that's what the Greeks were very good at. We're very bad at that.

So if we're, say, for example, in what's the problem in, in Russia and Ukraine, then we're in with sympathy for the enemy, in this case, the Russians, and try to understand how the world. They're not crazy.

They're not deluded. There's a deep historical picture that drive a deep sense of a great sense of grievance. And there has to be understood if you did anything like conflict resolution or diplomacy or if people just go around saying he's evil or he's a satanic figure, he's a dictator, you're missing the point.

You have to understand the context out of which he's speaking and try and understand that before you get a full picture. And that means with regard to the news media, it does mean going deeper than the information that we're provided with, that's for sure. So I'm not saying we should defend the Russians, on the contrary, but you have to understand the way they see the world and the sense of victimization that they have, the grievance they have,

and the sense that in their minds, they're defending Ukraine against what they see as a nationalist, even Nazified government, which is, and they're defending the Ukrainian people against their government. I think it's a wildly important thing to say, but you have to understand it before you can engage. So the first thing you do,

if you're thinking through concrete situations, is being able to the enemy. I think this is as crazy as a time it is right now. It's such a beautiful opportunity to understand philosophy. I think you're giving people an education right now on philosophy and how to see the world in a way that is more complex and in a lot of moving parts than in reality, which brings me back

to your book. I've noticed through your book that there's this beautiful ebb and flow, and just so everybody sees it again, this is the book right here, ladies and gentlemen, it's called Bald, and it is a book that you definitely want to read. And I've noticed throughout your book, there's this ebb and flow of, like, wonder and disappointment and this movement that goes between the divine and time that seemed to kind of run through the book. Okay. We've already spoken a little bit about the ebb and flow of time, from the Ukraine to the Peloponnesian wars, but there seems to be another strand that I've noticed, and that

is the divine and time. We go from Dostoevsky's Inquisitor to Philip K. Dick, which both have a element of the divine in them. And I was wondering, what is it, is it, do you find those particular? are two things to be fascinating? Or did you realize that you wove those stories in between each other? Or is, what can you tell us about that?

It's a lifelong fascination with, with religion from a perspective, which is not really a faith perspective of people would say here. I don't have a, I'm fascinated. I feel most closely the kind of the pull of certain strands of Christianity. And the fact I'm just opposite, where I am now in New York is opposite St. Patrick's Cathedral.

Oh, wow. There we are. It exists in Patrick's beautiful. That Rockefeller's sensitive the other side of the street. Yeah. And I'm fascinated with that. And I don't, I'm impatient with what I see as evangelical atheism,

which was maybe not so practical now, but was very much in mode with people. Christopher Hitchens and so there's an attempt to, I guess, very simply to see religion as a social phenomenon which is shared and which is real for society that experience it and to take that in the way that an anthropologist would. And so there's religion in many of the

essays in the book, but just to pick one, and you mentioned in your email that perhaps we could think about, it's, I wrote a series of things in 2019. I was living in Athens and working there for a few months. I then formed this idea of writing short essays from Athens, and I did about it. And this was not my idea at the time. I began to get interested in what's called Elefcina or Elefis or Eleusis, people sometimes say in English.

It's the ritual site just outside of Athens where the meeting took place. and I went there, a woman that runs the site, with a couple of friends and studying it and then reading it through. And there we have an interesting conundrum. On the one hand, we think of Athens as in the birthplace of democracy, which it was. Nobody had the idea of a political rule based on the equality of all citizens before, but that's what the Athenians.

and they were intensely rapidly legalistic people, very litigant and they made decisions to get into the public of the square. They declared the law. And on the other hand, the road from Athens is this place

on Elphsis, which was an obligation on all of the thing in the mystery. And we don't know what happened and I try and as it were explain what we can say with some degree of the essay, but there's a connection between

rule of law, policy, and participation of sacred mysteries. These two things are not in contradiction, they're consistent with each other. And for us, it's quite tricky. What can be able to be in between being a citizen and take that in a secret mystery? The thing about the mysteries is that whatever happened in a leftist had to stay in a leftist and nobody could betray because they would be killed. And so to take seriously the dimension of ritual in society and who are not to be dismissive of religious belief, again, to try and understand it,

and to try and understand it not as a set of cognitive states in the sense of which, you know, when people that don't understand religion will meet a religious just say, well, do you believe in the existence of God? Do you believe the immortal? Do you believe in the life to come? People are unclear about that. They'll still participate in the practice. They'll sort of move the rituals.

And it's that ritual. It's interesting. But when we're doing things together without necessarily doing it. And how those weird mysteries could be connected to the activity of lifeblood of democracy kind of interest me in as well. I love that. the series you did on Alephsis, it was a little disheartening

because everybody wants to believe that there was this incredible, mysterious, psychedelic experience that happened there, that overwhelmed everybody. And the truth may be a little bit more sobering. However, when I read your essay on that, it really made me believe

that that, in fact, is what we're missing and it ties together religion. You know, when you have a ritual or a rite of passage like that, it's something that not only points to the mystery, but you get to participate in the mystery with. So it's like everybody gets to work together and see themselves through this rite of passage. And it seems to me that that is what religion is. Religion is this understanding that we are all part of the whole, regardless if you

call it God or Buddha or Allah. It's this understanding that we participate in something that additionally points to the goal. And I think that even reading your book, it seems to me, if I peel back a page or two or some of the beautiful artwork in the words that you've used, I can see it pointing to that. Like, I think we're moving towards that, towards a type of awakening. And I hate to use mystical terms like that, but it seems that there is this new spirituality being developed. And it comes from the conflict that people like Hitchens and Harris have put out. They're like, no, you can't have this. This is where all evil is from. And I've got that topic from your book. And I just want to say, thank you for that. It's well done. And I really like the part on a

and the fact that you went there and you got to see the little well where Demeter would pop out of or Persephone would pop out of and maybe you could explain a little bit more to the people about what it was like to go there. There was a, the mysteries were over eight days

and the participants in the mystery is a series of active in slow procession. There would be various kind of sacrifices and offerings were made. and then eventually they would make their way along the sacred way, and there'd be out the temple's site, and the temple's a series of theaters, like a series of stages.

And you go through a, there's a kind of, there's a drama in the movement of the stages. It's extraordinary, and also the esplice, the great Greek tragic poet was from desecrating the mission and some of the ritual activity onto the stage. So outside the night is falling, there's some fire, people are fasting, they've been fasting a long time, and there is dancing, there is fire, the ritual to begin, and a drink which is cooled.

And this is where a lot of the theories take root, that Cook-I-on was a couple of hallucinogenic, some people have thought, and therefore when the, I just think of this guy went through. They were tripping. I mean, that might be the case. There might have been a psychoactive ingredient in this drink,

but people were, they were hungry. They were engaged in important venture, a participation in the mystery that you got to do once, twice, but most people did it once in them. And they knew that some of which importance was going to be shown to them. So they were at a susceptible state. And what they experienced, they experienced together. There was also an egalitarian, so for example, the Oracle at Delphi,

very rich to get into Delphi to afford massive extortionate fees they're required. But Elefsis was basically, there could be slaves, there were children, men, women, and young, all together. And in that, and then there are a series of things that you basically get, because the site of Alephsy is where Demeter, after she lost her daughter in Elefis, and she's crying into this well. And then God appears, says to her, you know, there's a way to do it and will intercession. And then eventually her daughter is returned. Demeter is returned to her, but she's tricked.

She eats a handful of pomegranate. We oblige you to return to Hades, to the world's partner for months every year. So that's the story. So it's about a mother and a lost daughter who returned to return to the underworld every year. And the word, the name to Greek is series in Latin and linked to cereal, right, to grain to cereal. And in Greek, cereal is Dimitriaca, right? So another way of looking at this mystery, it's about, it's a reenactment of foundations of society,

and this needs to be reenacted in order that there will be a harvest. It will be plain and there will be food. This idea, which is sort of lost to us, which was there in just about every society, every kind of neolithic, ancient society, with the rituals that the society. Rituals that people were involved

with were about the reproduction of this social form. How does that continue? And the continual to the social form requires food. So at the center of, or rather to the of the mystery site is a huge and the goddess is grain.

The goddess is food. And by participating in this recent you can control for the continuation of life through nourishment. There may be a more mysterious aspect to it in terms of this could be an idea of eternal life

or a woman that is reborn that is renewed. But what happened in the this evidence goes through this series of stages it takes an awful long time. They're hungry. They've been given this barren, grain, drink active substance in it and moving through these stages,

then they get to the central area of the Sterion. And in the... It's an enormous. It's like an enormous... You can just see the remains of it. It's enormous theatre in the centre of this huge space. It would have been darkness, torches, flaming, or something called the Anactaran.

And then the Anacharon was where the priests, the Heron, who were just from two families would engage in the rituals. And we don't know anything about what happened. But there are three words that are reports actually, I think from a Christian source, a later religious source, and three enigmatic words which are dromina, dagnumina and ligomena. Things done, things and things said.

So things were done, things were shown, said what was shown what was said we don't know. It would just be, and this is the opinion of the I was talking to, it might just be the it's great, right, is the, you know, is a head of barley or wheat and this means showing this means that there is food and there will be more. And so the religious ritual is the possibility

continuation of life. And that, of course, it finds an echo in some of ritual connected with Christianity and with many other religions, right? We get the death, we get the death of on

and then the resurrection on Easter Sunday. So, this is not lost to, isn't it? Is there spirituality emerging? Maybe, I think there's a, I think we have to accept that religion is not going away. religion has to be understood and grown.

It's a social phenomenon and respected too. Yeah, that's I guess what I say for a side. And I think in this country, in the United States, that means extremely seriously the Bible and Christianity in particular because the extraordinary thing about Christianity is that it's not just the religion of the people from Europe in here. it becomes the religion of the former slaves, right? And it gives a common rhetoric to the oppressor and the oppressed,

which has all sorts of cross-racial possibilities. And so I think if you're interested in understanding this place, it's an understanding what might be possible to begin with the kind of full understanding of the Bible. The Bible has possibilities which maybe we'll. take a little bit more seriously. Yeah, that was really well done. Thank you for that.

It's a great, I'm envious that, and it makes me inspired to want to go there and have that same new form of a Lusus trip, you know? And it reminds me, in your book, you're a big footballer, and there's so many similar, have you thought about the similarities between being in a football match and being at Alusis? Like, they're both kind of psychedelic.

It's like you're this team together and you're experiencing life and loss and the potential to win. And in so many ways, it seems like a sports is something that we can. In a weird way, it has taken the place of the ritual. And those of us who have gone to a big game and been part of a crowd, I use an example of going to the horse races.

That's like one of the only spots you'll see a millionaire hug a homeless person. You know, it doesn't matter if you're an emperor or a slave. But we find ourselves in these moments, be it a looses, or be it at a football match or at a horse race. where we can let go of the labels that were put upon us and just enjoy ourselves as the unity there. I think that's something to be said about elusive. I had one more point that I wanted to ask you.

Are you familiar with this idea of ontology repopitulates phylogeny? I think I'm saying that, right? Where, you know, we start off as like a sperm and we meet the egg and then we become this little tadpole. We relive every stage of our evolution in the womb. And might that also be what's kind of going on at a looses? Like we go there and we become one and we see that everybody has lost. Like people lose their children.

People die. When we see that, it kind of breaks down the barriers and we come together. And then at the end, like you say, we're giving food and we're like, look, it's going to be all right as long as we work together in order to do this. And I just wanted to bring that up. Yeah, the ritual reenact or replaced into the history of the society. indeed the case. So yeah, I agree with that. And the relationship to sport,

well, in a particular soccer, I spend lots of my time reading about watching and thinking about, it's one powerful place of ritual activity goes, and it's extremely interesting. So one,

there's a couple of cases on soccer in the book, and one of them is from, I've been there, I've been there five years, There's a bar, I love a football club bar, and I know all the people, and there's a whole ritual connected with that. Really know them. I mean, I don't, most of them don't speak English and my Greek.

We're supporting the same team. We're together, and the levels of, I don't know, frenzy, collective frenzy, which we're engaged with, are extraordinary. And also on Sunday, what day today is Tuesday today, on Sunday, my team Liverpool played Chelsea in the league cup final. It was, and I was in one of the Liverpool Pepsi bars in which was the 8th called the Grafton. And it was absolutely wild with, and when we won, the whole run the noise, the kind of the sheer joy, the shared joy that we experienced at that moment. And then singing

for the way in which a sport, soccer work through song, and we in Liverpool, we have a lot of songs and some will begin the song and then you're watching the game and singing song the ways of dealing with the

anxiety or attention of watching the game. You don't want you to win or if you're going to lose but you hope that you're going to be and so I think you can learn a lot through that. And these people, you know, So the people I watch the game with on Sunday, and this happens a lot to me. There's two or three people I'm quite close to, but the past few strangers.

But the purposes of watching the game, we're friends. We're on the same team. We support the crowd, and this isn't just a small activity. This is a whole set of values of beliefs. And this means a lot more than any two men kicking a piece of stick around on a pitch. this is a like and also with me this is really important what living areas of my life are that connect me the past i can remember the past my father was on my grandmother's grave or emblem when we had to call it and showed it to someone yeah well she was a Liverpool fan obviously and then so we've got just say my grandmother grandfather

my father, me, son who's 30, that's a hundred years support for this team. It's not just about the team. It's a commitment to a whole framework and that thing and it's passed on

as you are watching it and celebrating. There are very few areas of life that resonance, it seems to. You know, this brings up such an amazing point to me because we were talking about in your book you spoke about time and how our idea is that we move forward through time.

But what you just just explain to me is that is it possible that you have experienced the same time as your grandmother, your grandfather, and that your son will by going and experiencing these games and singing the same songs and hugging the same stranger when so-and-so scores a goal or you're the first plight or whatever. Isn't it amazing to think that we can see and experience time, we can move through time? But no one talks about that. But I think you get into that in your book a little bit. Like, what do you think about that?

It's right. I was sent, I was offered a ticket to the game by my cousin, David, and I couldn't get back because of work here, work commitments in New York. He went and his father to see games in the 1950s. And Ray and my dad went to Liverpool play. And my cousin and I maintain this post-connection around the team. And he looks a lot like his dad. and I suppose I look at my dad. And so we're both ghosts at that point.

We're being ghosted by the past, and we're trying to pass that on down to the next. Whereas the order of time gets very confused. We have an idea of time as a linear. Time is a line, no longer now, the past, now, the present, and not yet now, the future. And that is a kind of linear idea of time, which is how we get through the days

but there's also an idea of time as as circular as a time when time when in a sense merge and mix and this is something that I mean Philip K. Dick calls orthogonal time which he explains as a circle that explains everything and he

which I think is a lovely image from the end of the book where I talk about he's thinking about all the sudden as a circle contains everything and he compares this that was just as grooves or an LP contain that part of the music which has already

been played here after the stylus track about it in terms of an image of an LP about that in say the seemingly final chord at the end of the Beatles Sergeant Pepper which on the original

that chord would just keep when we gather an intensity. At that point, the past and the future begins to blur. And that's both a useful thing in a slight in a sense that we are

haunted by ghosts and we are ourselves ghosts and maybe we'll haunt others at the future. Teaching Shakespeare's Hamlet and I'm very preoccupied with ghosts. that's what I'm meant to be doing today.

Anyway, so yeah, that's amazing. The time isn't a line, it's at least a circle or a loop, and we can't simply pass present. Most importantly, if we think we're, this is what I put extra, on tragedy, if we think we're through with the past, then we're ruined because the past is going to destroy us. So we have to respect the past, embodied the past, live it, pass it on to the next generations.

Yeah, like, it's beautiful. First off, thank you so much. Is there, I've got all your links below. Is there anything else that maybe you could leave us with before you leave? Like, what do you want people to get out of this book that if you could tell people or hope that, maybe not hope, but what would you want them to get out of this? I'd like them to, well, it's the idea that the idea of open-mindedness. an open-minded fearlessness. That's what I hope is communicated by the book.

If you, I mean, you can live in, it's easy to live in fear, and in a sense the world makes more sense. It's as of living in fear. You live in fear of what's going to happen, what someone's going to say about you, you know, so on and so forth, particularly with social media and the rest. But I think there's a kind of, I think if we can have a kind of a feeling,

of fearlessness and open-mindedness and connected with that. It might not come through in the book so much, but it's certainly what's behind it, who is a kindness to treat with a kindness and not to assume that you know, assume you know what they mean, and you can already interpret it, but to allow yourself surprised by phenomena.

And that's, this is like a version of, Dave Chappelle's mantra, be nice and don't be scared. If I could get people to think philosophically, that would be scared. That would be great. So one thing I try to encourage, it's very hard to encourage,

is, yeah, is courage, is courage, it's courage, it's fearlessness when it comes to thinking. And this doesn't belong to any elite people. This is completely accessible. The most fantastic things ever written, in the history of the world are instantly available. And you know, you can just swim in them or listen to them or whatever it might be.

And it's, and also I think that I'm very passionate about, which is kind of how I put myself out of a job, is in a way I believe in teaching. But I believe much more importantly in self-teaching in also didacts. And I'm very fond of people that have cultivated amateur knowledges of things. And I wish there were more, what we need, we need less education. And that used to be what public life. But now we can do that. And we can do it. Well, fantastic.

I think you accomplished that. I think that your words paint a picture of fearless experience and instills in people a curiosity that helps to inspire their own exploration. And I've read multiple articles multiple times. and I keep getting things into there. So thank you for your writing style and your mission to come out there and try to help people help themselves

by investigating more. And I really thank you for taking time for me and my audience. Ladies and gentlemen, buy this book bald. It is a masterpiece. It's fun to read. Where is it? It's fun to read. And you'll learn a lot.

I know that I did. And, Doctor, you're a welcome back here anytime. I know you have other books. I would love to talk to you about them. I hope you have a great day. I hope Liverpool. It's best. Thank you.

Okay. Have a good afternoon. Thank you so much. Bye-bye now. Bye.