Jonathan Wallis and Wolf Tivy cover the role of passion in intellectual inquiry. The academy’s sin is that its people have lost their passion, content to go through the motions. With passion, the work comes alive—but this upsets careers and institutions.
Transcript
Intro (00:00)
Wolf: Welcome back to The Students. I’m your host, Wolf Tivy. I’m here joined today by Jonathan Wallis. Jonathan is founder of a wonderful little thing called Avalon Institute, which is a great intellectual space where me and a lot of my friends hang out, and where we find a lot of our fellow students. Now, what I wanted to discuss today is the problem of intellectual space.
In particular, where we could start this discussion is with the decline of our society’s intellectual capacity. I think we’ve all seen that things have gotten worse in academia, in our humanities especially, I would say. Our ability as a society to kind of process what’s happening to us and think about what kind of future we actually want, what kind of society we actually want. Those things seem to have gotten captured by a lot of what I would call corruption, but decline more generally. And so why don’t we start with that?
I’d love to hear, Jonathan, your take on what has gone wrong, and then we’ll take that as a jumping-off point to get into the very practical matters of, okay, how do we actually fix that? What have we done? What have our friends done? What do we want to do? What should someone else be doing?
Academic decline and the loss of the passions (01:40)
Wolf: How do we actually get out of this? How do we make our society smart again? So yeah, Jonathan, what’s your diagnosis?
Jonathan: I think that the core of the matter has to do with fragmentation of passion.
Wolf: Fragmentation of passion.
Jonathan: There are a lot of different institutional problems that kind of creep up. You could say that a lot of money is being spent very inefficiently. You could say that the sort of whole system has lost its initial reason for existing. You could say that a lot of academics are, though there are good ones, are either dishonest or just not properly motivated to really grapple with the truth. But there’s a question of why.
It’s like if there are, say, bad or corrupt people running the institutions, why were they not chased out? Why was not much of a fight put up? If the disciplines themselves are fragmented or only sort of limping along or just engaging in something that is more of a game, why does it feel like a game and not something serious? And I would say that the answer to all of these things is that the unifying passions were lost. I think if you look at something like a healthy music scene, it is a really illustrative example.
Because music really lets you put your passion and skill on immediate display—and then people who care about it will orient around that. They’ll be like, “Well, I want to help bring this thing into the world.” Everyone kind of knows how to be silent at the right times, how to come in in support, whether that’s by playing another instrument or helping the space get set up. It’s like the passion being on display and being actualized and turned from passion into reality—is the central organizing force. And I think if we look at these intellectual fields that have suffered the worst decline, academic philosophy is certainly among them.
You’ll see that there’s not—
Wolf: Reminds me of the stories of Nick Land in the ‘90s. His performative antics in academic philosophy, which I think it’s not a mistake both that he’s one of the greats of modern philosophy, and that his academic antics were unorthodox and maybe more like that kind of musical performance.
Jonathan: Yeah. I mean—
Wolf: I don’t know what you think of that, but...
Jonathan: You should probably give an example—for our audience
Wolf: I mean, we’ve covered Meltdown before, right? Meltdown is this famous, very strange essay. Nothing human makes it out of the near future. The story goes like this. So he goes up, and that was a lecture that he gave.
It’s this very strange kind of format for a lecture. It’s almost this poetic, prophetic vision. Or there was the time, the very famous time, I don’t know much of the detail here, where he was apparently high or something and just went up and sort of laid on the floor screaming at some high point of the lecture or the philosophical exercise, whatever—it was, right? And of course, he had the cult, the CCRU, the Cybernetic Cultural Research Unit, which engaged in all manner of unorthodox beliefs around the nature of time and strange epistemology and so on. But it was all kind of this combination of deadly serious—and just fun and performative and exploratory.
Jonathan: I think we all recognize, at least implicitly, that if people have actual passions, things start to get rough and interesting around the edges. And in ways that can—genuinely cause harm. They’re a natural consequence of trying to unite a lot of very passionate people. Just think of tropes around artists in society in general. And there’s an interesting question.
It’s like if you’re not very passionate about something or if you are very passionate about something, you should be willing to take risks and push against the edges of your society and really kind of fight for what you believe in. I always think about the distinction in some of the social patterns of relatively healthy or unhealthy academic fields. Agnes Callard had this really nice anecdote, basically just about the state of modern academic philosophy conferences. Where everyone goes to the conference, and they present their talks, and they do their panels. And then once they get out of the conference and go to a bar together, everyone stops talking about philosophy.
People do not want to talk about philosophy.
Wolf: Weird. How odd. What are you doing at a philosophy conference?
Jonathan: Well, it’s like society is enabling—
Wolf: Well, it’s become a job
Jonathan: this set of people. Well, right, but it’s like society is enabling the set of people who provide no direct economic remuneration to the rest of society. Now, I think these traditions are very valuable in the long run, but only if they’re in the hands of passionate people—who actually will break open new possibilities and do the hard work that takes you down rabbit holes, that open up society. But from society’s perspective, this is a little like a priesthood, and if your priests are not engaged and moved by the things they find sacred, how sad would that... You just imagine this for—
Wolf: They’re not doing their job
Jonathan: musicians, or I would say a healthier academic field today is pure mathematics. And I just guarantee you, let’s zoom in our camera of the mind of the pure mathematics people drinking coffee together in some coffee shop.
Wolf: Yeah, like Terry Tao meets—
Jonathan: What do you think they’re talking about, right?
Wolf: another mathematician, and they sit down for coffee.
Jonathan: And they—
Wolf: Yeah, they’re talking about theorems
Jonathan: have this incredibly passionate desire to unite talent and bring it together in different formats, and find kids who are really good at the thing. Now, I think that probably mathematics is something that younger minds are naturally very good at. People have often commented on it. It’s like literature, you get a lot of people’s best work in their 40s through 60s, basically. And mathematics, you start falling off after you’re 28 or 30.
But despite that, I think there’s nowhere, even given that kind of gap in orientation, I think there’s nowhere near the same kind of search in the philosophical world for like, “Well, let’s find the 12-year-olds who are the most, who should be sent to the boarding school-”
Wolf: Well, you can imagine
Jonathan: for philosophy.”
Wolf: I mean—
Jonathan: And I think these things aren’t impossible.
Wolf: No.
Jonathan: I think maybe they should be done, and it’s just that it’s like, why? Well, the people who control and run and who are held by society to be the heads of these fields are often just not as passionate, and in pure math they are, and that bends everything together in 1,000 different ways—to just get something that has some force in it.
Passionate youth is dangerous (08:55)
Wolf: But I want to pull on that a little bit. It’s very interesting to imagine having a bunch of young people who are very passionate about philosophy, maybe especially political philosophy, getting together and passionately debating and trying to develop matters in that area. If I imagine what that looks like, that doesn’t look safe.
Jonathan: No.
Wolf: It looks extremely dangerous from society’s perspective today.
Jonathan: I think not just from society’s perspective. I think that historically, you get people together like this, and their willingness to be in conflict with each other is really, really high. They are—
Wolf: It’s not even with each other. What happens when philosophy develops new ideas, they’re quite disruptive and can result in wars, can result in revolutions. And the interesting... Not always. I think actually you can have a healthy society that’s very oriented to philosophy and has the young people really passionately about that stuff, but it’s a society that’s sort of confident and barreling into the future in the way that our society just isn’t.
And it’s also connected to gerontocracy, right? I can’t imagine older people allowing unbridled philosophical development among young people the same way like mathematics, they might celebrate mathematics. It’s like, okay, well, mathematics isn’t dangerous to their social position the way that philosophy is. And it seems like a species of the general suppression of youth, or the just general gerontocracy in our societies. We’ve moved away from ever trusting youth to do the important things, and in a way that’s also moving away from ever trusting passion to do the important things.
And I’m reminded also of like you meet some nuclear physicist or some laser physicist or something, they’re working on some big super collider system, and you try to talk to them about the grinding of their lenses or the alignment of their lasers or the specific computational methods they need to take to blow up the whatever it is.
They seem not interested, right? It’s like, but these are the most fascinating topics. But there’s like, in a way, I think in these institutions, a lack of passion. And I think it’s so closely related to just rent-seeking and people just occupying chairs because out of a kind of performance of a social order that no longer exists. And I think about this philosophy conference, right?
It’s like, okay, nominally, what we’re doing with philosophy is trying to figure out the most important questions. We empower some class of very smart people who are interested in those questions to go figure them out passionately. They get together, they do conferences. And they publish their work, they debate their work. These are people who are into it.
And as a society, we kind of subsidize this because we believe in the power of truth and the power of philosophy. But what it’s kind of become is not that at all, it’s just that as a pretense for we hand out money to people who to do some paperwork occasionally. Right? And it’s sort of this, we’ve frozen the development of society somehow, or our society has ceased developing. So we just have people sitting in these chairs kind of going through the motions to, I don’t know, convince each other that someone is convinced.
It also reminds me of the late Soviet Union, where you’ve got these socialist theorists and economic planners and so on, kind of going through the motions of the five-year plan—here’s how we achieve the revolution, here’s how we—increase production. Meanwhile, everything’s decaying. They kind of know the game is up. Everything’s a gerontocracy. It’s just old people sitting in chairs.
These all seem like the same issue, and if there’s a... I don’t know if it’s the cure, because I don’t think that it’s easy to just do on its own, but if there’s a symptom of the cure, it’s meritocracy, of finding, in the true sense, of finding those really passionate young people who actually just want to do the real thing, and giving them power to do it. And that’s something that our society is very afraid of.
Passion can’t be measured (14:08)
Jonathan: And I think that meritocracy, I know this isn’t what you mean, but I think it often evokes this sense of test-taking. And a socially legible process.
Wolf: That’s how it’s been turned into another rent-seeking system. It’s like, oh, you take the test, and then we pretend that the people who do well on the tests are the ones who are getting into the institutions, and we pretend that what meritocracy means is then they should just have the best consulting jobs or whatever. But I think that’s so distant from the real thing, even if the real thing would involve testing. I think it should involve testing, and it should involve giving people unlimited, these sort of unrestricted sinecures and power positions on the result of, yeah, you actually just are good. Not at clawing your way up through some institution, but you’re just smart, you’re just passionate, and we can measure that and here you go.
Jonathan: Yeah. Well it’s—
Wolf: I think that would be something amazing
Jonathan: it’s the passion that I’m not sure can be measured. I mean you can measure—
Wolf: Yeah. It’s very hard
Jonathan: people’s knowledge, and that’s my thing.
Wolf: It’s very hard to measure passion.
Jonathan: I’m just using music as an analogy again. It’s very difficult to imagine. Well, they test people, but they test them on their own terms, and if you, I’m sure, go to different musical schools using different styles or approaches to music, what being tested looks like is going to be very different. You are actually encountering this kind of living culture that has created its own set of heuristics—for what promising talent looks like.
Wolf: Well, I think, yeah, the trouble is that promising passionate talent is sort of distinguished by willingness to go against local incentives for the sake of the craft. And so you don’t really discern that until you put them in a situation where to continue on the path is hard, the rewards are in some other direction, and you watch how they respond to that. Right? And you say, “Oh, actually, you don’t really seem as interested in this music thing as you thought now that it’s not necessarily as rewarding as something else,” or you’re free of social constraint in the... You can imagine some kid who’s been pushed very hard into studying the piano or something—and doesn’t necessarily have a deep passion for it from their own heart, and you might notice this at some point when they’re cut off from that social pressure and just placed in an environment where they can do what they want, and then that’s where you notice it.
But the problem is as soon as you’re handing out rewards on the basis of, “Oh, we measured your passion and you actually are passionate, so we’re going to give you a reward,” as soon as people know about that, they fake it, right? Because now there is an incentive. It goes that way. And so it’s very tough. And I wonder if for that reason, meritocracy is always a destructive act.
It’s something that you do once. You do it in a generation where it’s like, okay, well, why don’t we just measure everyone and put a bunch of the smart people in charge? You get away with that once, right? You get the next generation, everyone knows the game, and they spoof it, and it becomes lazy people sitting in chairs. The alternate kind of view is maybe the more stable thing that the fraternity of physicists or something did previously.
It was much more individualized monitoring, working closely, apprenticeship—and then like, oh, this kid is actually promising, and then they prove themselves in this pure sort of unmotivated or un-incentivized craft—
Jonathan: Yeah. Well, this is—
Wolf: where they have the power to do it. And that’s maybe something that we don’t have today. You go back. There’s these guys sitting around, some very intelligent people, who for whatever reason have the social position to just pursue physics. But it’s not because they’re sort of high status, but not because of that. And I think now we’ve tied these things together.
To be a high-grade physics professor is like you’re sort of been given this stamp of approval by the state, and so you get more people kind of clawing into the position.
Jonathan: The thing I would say is that I think a test has to be a tool in the hands of someone who is passionate to—develop a holistic picture of the individual. Our admissions essays pretend to do this in the most facetious way possible. But the point is real. And that’s something that in the world of mathematics, I’m sure they have a huge battery of interesting tests, novel things you’ve never heard of, for testing really early mathematical capacity, the sort of thing that Terence Tao would’ve been exposed to at a young age. But when you have this actual battery—
Wolf: But the other thing is just like—
Jonathan: that you can come in and apply at different times and iterate over.
Wolf: Yeah. I think other parts of it is just the real ones. A friend of mine in physics, he in high school or whatever, sought out some professor and did some work with him of a real kind, and then that was recognized at some point. But most people won’t do that because they don’t care. They’re not passionate.
They don’t have that real authentic ability either. And it’s not necessarily rewarded. It’s recognized sometimes. So maybe they’re actually more interested in the 1,000th kind of fake NGO that people cook up to get into college.
Building the beacons (20:28)
Wolf: So I guess there’s this—yeah, so what we’re getting at is there’s a few models here. One model is someone with the passion and a lot of power can go do something to identify the right people, and they’ll do something novel. It has to be something novel, otherwise people game it. And something that the strivers aren’t expecting but that will grab the passionate to raise them up. The other thing is the more continuous model of kind of intellectual peerage, intellectual apprenticeship.
And so I think those models historically seem to be where a lot of these guys come from. Let’s apply it to Isaac Newton. Okay, well, there was this institution where they—I think they really did care about a lot of the answers to questions of the faith and seminary school. And there were, in recent memory, big wars fought over these matters. There were still debates being had actually quite recently, because that was around the time of the English Civil War.
Or shortly after. But so you have this institution that has a lot of passion in it, and then it grabs these smart kids like Newton and—says, “Well, go do your thing.”
Jonathan: And the Royal Society—they relocate to London. And they sort of unhouse themselves from Oxford—because it wasn’t a true home of passion for them at that time. But they managed to get together the right set of people and get royal patronage, and then it was off to the races. But I think for things to go better at the end of the day in any kind of field, I think passionate people have to actually expend a lot of energy to find each other. Really, I think you have to go out there and do it.
It’s like someone has to be the first person to start making those links. I guarantee you there are passionate humanities professors out there, the real solids, the old school, or professors of philosophy—who would love it if some talented 16-year-old or 18-year-old showed up and was ready to deeply engage and had thoughts of their own. I think that both on a level of that’s not an expected thing someone does, if you’re super passionate about physics, your parents are just much more likely to be supportive of that process than if you’re very passionate about philosophy because—
Wolf: But how much of that is just a symptom of the 20th century where philosophy is illegal and physics is given the state national security kind of patronage?
Jonathan: Well, it’s just a very immediately and legibly powerful skill set in a lot of ways. So it’s related to the state as well but—
Wolf: Well, but that wasn’t—I think in the 19th century, it might’ve been the opposite.
Jonathan: No. Yeah. Well...
But—
Wolf: Physics hadn’t proven itself and philosophy had.
Jonathan: My point is just I think that there’s this kind of—I think as you get together many different passionate people, over time, that they start to figure out how to sort of perform their own concert or their own harmony of all the different things they’re doing, all related to the shared object of their passion. And as they get a better harmony going, it becomes louder and more catching within the rest of society.
Wolf: Yeah. And they figure out who the real ones are, right? There’s the people who are just there for some random unrelated reason, there’s the people who are there as strivers or whatever. Yeah, and then there’s the people who actually are interested in the subject. And there has to be enough freedom kind of in the background that that they are able to coalesce.
Jonathan: And my point is just there is this beacon caused by the flame of all the pure—
Wolf: Yeah, this budding—
Jonathan: The people who are passionate about the math—
Wolf: This budding concentration
Jonathan: have come together. But if you want that kind of thing to exist for the things that you are passionate about, you need to go and—
Wolf: You need to actually do it
Jonathan: you need to actually do it, and you need to actually also find other people who are doing it.
Wolf: But isn’t that interesting? We’re sort of proposing a model that is inherently counter-institutional. It’s building an institution, but it’s not helped by any institutions. It’s not something where it’s like, oh, if we set up society in such and such a way, this can happen more easily and naturally. Except maybe we have the idea of academia as this.
But there’s this sense in which the true church of academia is not the apparent church of—the human institution, right? And the human institution is often corrupt, often filled with lazy gerontocrats, just filling chairs, or hardworking strivers who just want the piece of paper, they just want the awards. And the passionate, actual philosophers have to gather outside of that, and then they occasionally take it over. Because I think as soon as you had a situation where you have lazy, old academia on one hand, and you have the actual people with passion and energy on the other hand, getting results, I think they would rapidly, the—the Mandate of Heaven of academia would fall to the new crowd. But—
Jonathan: I think if they’re organized. So one of the things I’m really worried about, one of the things that’s—pretty clear to me—
Wolf: Well, I think if they were doing it for real, which involves—a certain level of organization
Jonathan: I don’t know about this for real. I don’t know if we mean the same thing by it. So I believe that you could totally have a couple very talented musicians, but no one plays exactly their style of music, and they’re old and they still love their music. But they’re going to go on and play together, this two or three remaining old people of this tradition, and then it’s going to die out. I think this kind of thing happens all the time, where people have become comfortable or resigned to doing something that is locally real, like it is the real activity, but not actually passionate enough to take the next step and say, “We are doing something good, and we want to create the conditions where it’s possible for...”
I think having apprentices, bringing people into your tradition, finding enough funding to really make it flourish—putting yourself—
Wolf: Yeah, because I’m talking about that larger picture of, okay, it’s not just hobbyists, it’s people who have a more totalizing dream of creating the conditions of intellectual flourishing and civilization.
Jonathan: They have to be passionate about making this a living tradition within their society. And I say this because I’ve met a lot of people who it’s basically like they’re very smart, they have a few friends who are very smart. They’re in some crevice or nook or thing within academia that’s more functional than the rest of it. And they put up with the bureaucracy, and they roll their eyes when something dumb is happening that the institution is foisting upon them, but they have enough money, they have enough of a little crevice, they’re happy to keep doing that. And this is like, it’s its own—
Wolf: Well, that’s what it—
Jonathan: kind of ivory tower mentality where—
Wolf: That’s what it feels like to just fill a rent-seeking chair, is you feel like you’re doing the real thing, but maybe you’re held back by the stupidity of the institution, but you’re kind of just sitting there.
Jonathan: I think we have to distinguish between... I think that, for example, making music well is not the same activity as making a concert hall well, is not the same activity as making a really excellent violin, is not the same activity—as getting a lot of people to come and show up and dress up for the music. And traditional classical music as we appreciate it as a society, is defined by the conjunction of so many different sub-tasks and works. And I think it is actually important to draw the distinction between you’re doing the central activity, but you are either resigned or in a position of despair, or just don’t have enough energy to do all these things that really cause it to be amplified, to become this—living fire within your society.
Complicity and sin (29:10)
Wolf: What I’m emphasizing is that despair and defeat are sins. And at best, those people, they’ve been marginalized. They’re kind of prevented from doing the real crafts—
Jonathan: Well, I think specifically—
Wolf: by the surrounding decline. But I think there’s an element of complicity there. Because there’s also the correct thing to do, which isn’t easy, the heroic thing to do, is to go and fix that—to overcome it.
Jonathan: I think there’s a question here of different social... Let’s say that out there in the world, there is some 75-year-old professor of philosophy that either of us would happily just talk to at indefinite length because their play of ideas and their knowledge of experience is so good. I don’t know that it’s that person’s role, sort of existentially, to be the one who leads the charge and builds the new—
Wolf: No, but they’re an old text
Jonathan: and moves the chairs.
Wolf: Right? Someone like that is an old text. They’re an artifact of some previous time. But like [inaudible]. I don’t know. I find it important to apply the full standard.
Like, yeah, we insulate people from the full standard, but I think that’s a certain level of dehumanization. You’re saying, “No, this person doesn’t have real agency. We don’t expect them to be the hero.” And I think we have to recognize one of the things that, I don’t know, gets people out of these situations, like actually creates the new generation is the attitude of, “That’s not acceptable.” “We have to go do it for real.”
Even if you’re only applying that standard to yourself, someone has to apply—that standard somewhere.
Jonathan: And I think it isn’t acceptable. I think the position people who are talented inside of academic institutions which are corrupt, which are dominated by a class of administrators who do not know what they are doing, or who do know what they’re doing and what they’re doing is bad—to sort of sit there and accept that the head of a major Ivy League institution has committed Alzheimer’s fraud, and then that just sort of, “Oh, well, they resign,” and then we all go on with our business as usual, as if this isn’t—as if this isn’t one of the most horrifying things that has happened—in the history of this institution. How did it get there? How could it have gone so far? And that’s only one of the more prominent cases of just—just a horrendous slew of misappropriated funds and wasted time and energy and rent-seeking.
But so it’s like, to allow yourself... I think, what, to me, the people are doing, it’s like what’s the specific sin, if you will? It is that they are letting the legitimacy they naturally create by being passionate, be appropriated by the system—so it can continue.
Wolf: The sin is paying taxes.
Jonathan: Yeah. They are—
Wolf: So to speak
Jonathan: they are being squeezed for the last remaining juice of passion—they have left.
Wolf: Yeah. Like they—
Jonathan: So the system can maintain the pretense that it is really about these things.
Wolf: Right. Like what—
Jonathan: But that gives you a very... But to me, that’s like we have to wake these people up. And we also have to—
Wolf: Well, there has to be some—
Jonathan: We also have to help them, right?
Wolf: There has to be something like an alternative, right? There has to be the true passionate alternative somewhere out there. And if there isn’t, then that’s on us, right? That’s our failure, that’s our sin, is failing to do that. But if there’s anyone out there doing the real thing, anyone with any shred of integrity within the system has a duty to defect to that, right?
Because otherwise they’re just holding up these rent-seeking gerontocratic institutions. And if we see things that way, there’s, I guess one way I’m modeling it is there’s this crown of academia, right? Or this mandate, this conventional social role that we’ve been convinced of, 2,500 years of kind of Platonic civilization.
We’ve been convinced that there is this social role of the philosophers institutionalized in society. Now, unfortunately, the nature of things is that that’s always in decay, they’re always getting corrupted, and they need to be always replaced. But what it then is, is a prize to be won by anyone who actually does that, right? If you can actually deliver, then you get this prize. And the duty of everyone who has true passion is to be that little bit of revolutionary, to always create the next version of academia that’s going to take the prize of legitimacy from this decrepit current one.
To paraphrase Jefferson, “The tree of academia is getting thirsty again.”
Jonathan: We need perpetual revolution in academia.
Wolf: Perpetual revolution. I think philosophy is inherently a revolutionary act. I think academia is kind of inherently a revolutionary institution. I think this has been true since Plato cooked it up. I think people have done good work on that subject.
There’s this paradox, right, of the philosopher as spiritual tyrant, the philosopher as criminal, and on the one hand. And on the other hand, philosopher as doctor of the city, philosopher as priest, philosopher as legitimating kind of wise center of society. And that’s this very interesting tension there. But I think both are true somehow through this mechanism.
Jonathan: Mm-hmm. Yeah, this reminds me, one of the metaphors that I often use to describe what I’m trying to do and the position I think of much of the modern intellectual world and academia, is that it’s a lot like a late-stage imperial dynasty. And I think a lot of, when I talk to smart people who are much more within the system than I am—I think there is this anxiety of like, “Well, if this thing goes away, maybe nothing will replace it.” And I think that that’s a fair concern to have.
Wolf: If we stop—
Jonathan: We could just slide into this dark age—where there’s like not even—
Wolf: If we stop believing in the concept—then it might just go away. But I think we don’t have to do that.
Jonathan: No.
Wolf: History’s a matter of the will. We can actually just choose to rebuild.
Jonathan: But it’s a lot like the anxiety of like you’re in this late-stage imperial dynasty. There’s this giant structure of bureaucracy, which is like the only thing—enabling law and order and governance and the irrigation to function. And then it takes someone who is willing, who is passionate enough to say—this is bullshit. We need to do something much, much better. The mandate of heaven is being lost, and if it doesn’t happen now, it will be even worse down the line.
Wolf: Yeah, it’s a matter of integrity. You have to have integrity.
Jonathan: You have to have integrity and you have to... I think that the transition, revolutions I think are worse the longer it takes them to sort of—be cooked up from the bad state.
Wolf: Yeah. Because it’s this like counting—
Jonathan: Because you can’t inherit the old social functionality because it—becomes too decayed. I think if the American Revolution had happened in 1850, it would’ve been a total bloodbath and we would not think of it nearly as fondly as we do today.
Wolf: That’s an interesting point. Yeah. And, yeah, a lot of the blood of the revolution is actually sort of paying down the sins of the previous declining order in some way. And the philosophers are clear on the matter of integrity with respect to these institutions, like Confucius famously, “When the way does not prevail in the empire, it is shameful to be near the center, to be rich and powerful. When the way does prevail in the center, it is shameful to be off in the woods.”
I forget exactly—how he states this, but it’s shameful to be far and low. And I think people should take that more seriously, and I think right now it’s sort of...
Well, the general idea there is you go where it’s possible to be high integrity, to be pursuing the true thing and with higher integrity.
And I think... Yeah, so the problem comes down to how can people with high-integrity passion for the real subjects, for the life of the mind, for whatever it is that we call this thing, philosophy, how can they create the conditions of growth of that, the growth of a new order of that project? Because it has been revolutionized many times. Many times this is quiet. Many times it is accompanied by wars that seem to overshadow it.
I think the Second World War, sort of a more recent revolutionary war within academia as well. Before that you have the fraternity of physicists. After that you have institutionalized physics. And then I think the peer review situation happened most completely through the 1960s kind of—cultural revolution. The rise of the German-style research university in the 19th century was itself accompanied by larger social changes.
Jonathan: Oh, it was a response to Napoleon—fundamentally.
Wolf: It’s caused by and is a response to, and it accompanies and causes larger social changes elsewhere. But people imagine like, oh, academia, it’s this kind of traditional thing, right? But it’s changing every few generations. It’s a total revolution every few generations where it’s been renewed by a new class of people—with a new political program. And it’s kind of necessary, I think, by these arguments, that that be the case.
There is no stability in the institutions. There’s only this continuous growth and decay.
Jonathan: You can’t step into the same institution twice.
Peer review (40:38)
Jonathan: Peer review is very interesting to me as like—
Wolf: Okay, let’s talk about it
Jonathan: people’s self-concept about what is going on in these journals and in these institutions. Because I think fundamentally, the idea that you should be reviewed by your peers in the most literal sense is straightforwardly correct and true.
Wolf: Right. It’s trivial, right?
Jonathan: You should put yourself out there in front of your friends. Your friends should engage in this friendly but passionately critical dialogue with you so that you can become your best self—and your problems can be worked out.
Wolf: And your success as a thinker is ultimately your ability to be, perhaps eventually, maybe later, but accepted as—part of the conversation.
Jonathan: You want the acclaim of your peers. So that’s a healthy and good thing to want. But the question is always, well, are these people really your peers? And I think there’s a very interesting, if you talk to people who are playing the institutional game—they will often have a lot of attachment to the title itself, but does someone else having that title mean that they actually view them with some baseline of respect? Probably not.
Probably most people, they don’t actually view their titular peers—as their peers. So there’s a kind of very interesting hypocrisy baked into the system.
Wolf: Why not? Can you explain that? I’m not sure what you’re talking about there.
Jonathan: I think that many people have some sort of self-belief, right, you’re wrong. They believe that they are the real thing. And the case of, say, an unfortunate case, they have some old shred of passion they sort of carry around, chambered within their soul—that gives them some kind of self-pride that they should be—
Wolf: Some talisman of passion.
Jonathan: Yes. Some—
Wolf: That legitimates what they’re actually doing.
Jonathan: Yes. It legitimates it. And out of this, I think you see a lot of the worst kinds of vanity or pride.
And people have this self-concept that is really just central to their being, and because of its centrality, it can’t move or be mobile or be responsive at all because it’s this very thin pillar. So therefore, there’s a lot of weight on this tiny, thin—this toothpick of passion that’s holding up their whole self-concept.
And so therefore it’s not mobile. Or if you have a firm foundation, you could scoop part of the foundation and put something back in. So it’s like, I think actually if you have a lot of passion, your self-concept is more mobile and you can be like, “Oh, man, yeah, I don’t know Latin.” That’s a little bit embarrassing. That should be for if you’re trying to be—
Wolf: Yeah, of course it’s embarrassing
Jonathan: an intellectual of caliber. And we’re all sitting here in a modern—we should all be a little bit embarrassed, but you’re not going to go shoot yourself. You’re like—
Wolf: Well, that would just—
Jonathan: Because you have all these other things.
Wolf: That’s just a more shameful act, right?
Jonathan: Right. That’s even more—
Wolf: This is the one big thing that’s true in sort of the Christian worldview, right, is that we are, in fact, all condemned in terms of our total inadequacy—
Jonathan: Yeah, I wouldn’t—
Wolf: to what we need to be. The ultimate sin is not being God, right? Like, it’s—
Jonathan: Yeah. I wouldn’t say total inadequacy, but I—
Wolf: Well, maybe not total
Jonathan: don’t exactly share that worldview
Wolf: but extensive inadequacy.
Jonathan: Yes. We all have inadequacies, and we should all be at least slightly chagrined, and they should cause all of us—
Wolf: No, we should be
Jonathan: to be silent and attentive at times. We all must take the role of the student.
Wolf: Right. Yeah. This is why we’re The Students.
Jonathan: We all have to be students on occasion.
Wolf: The student must be humble and must be constantly—learning and growing. But—
Jonathan: But it’s like if you do know things, you’re also reciprocally obligated to be the teacher from time to time. But to—
Wolf: Yeah. No, I’m not—
Jonathan: come back to this thing about peerage
Wolf: talking about a humility among ourselves—and being quiet and so on. We’re both Nietzscheans, right? So, I think we take a very different interpretation of this idea anyways. But, I do want to name that, that there’s maybe too many people are too content with themselves in actually quite mean circumstances.
Jonathan: Yeah.
And so when it comes to this thing about peerage, you actually see a lot of contempt in these worlds, especially if you talk to people privately. I have seen a French department have contempt for people from the literature studies who are engaging with French literature, who are very fluent in French, who are very passionate about—the whole Francophone project.
Wolf: Yeah. They get caught up in defending these boundaries.
Jonathan: They get caught up in defending these boundaries, and there comes to be this kind of poisonous contempt that I think you will see a lot less of in, say, the world of pure mathematics, where there is a means by which a real peerage is recognized. And it is this very much like, I think you can have a sense of equality, you can have a round table, even though, say, Arthur is still the king. There are still these points of equality and points of peerage that are very well recognized—and a set of kind of rights and responsibilities that exist inside of that. So it’s like, even if Terence Tao is that much over all these other mathematicians, they’re all initiated into this tradition, and they all will, I think in a lot of cases, at least try to treat each other with a kind of baseline of respect. But it’s like—
Wolf: Yeah. Well, it’s—
Jonathan: You ask—
Wolf: collaborative peerage, right?
Jonathan: But people are going to submit to these journals, and they’re going to undergo peer review. And I think in a lot of cases, in the majority of cases in the world of philosophy and the humanities, if you were able to get an honest answer from people, they would probably tell you that, yeah, these three people reviewing them, they don’t maybe literally think much of them, or they don’t think much of them, or maybe they, “Well, that guy has half of a good idea.” And so I think it’s very interesting that we—
Wolf: Well, it’s—
Jonathan: end up in this position where you have a lot of attachment to your title, but you don’t have any respect, or you have very limited respect. It’s this abstract sense of—
Wolf: Well, this almost feels like—
Jonathan: pride or accomplishment
Wolf: a problem that has been engineered into being a problem that doesn’t need to be. In particular, let’s talk about what’s actually going on with peer review. There’s this novel idea sometime in the late 20th century that the academic concept of being accepted by your peers means being gatekept and edited and censored by your peers in this uniform process across—these journals.
Jonathan: Well, it’s really institutionalized. Yeah.
Wolf: Where it’s institutionalized. Would someone like Nietzsche pass peer review? No, because you’d just get some bunch of clowns, conventional clowns sitting there like—
Jonathan: Well, he sort of didn’t—
Wolf: “I don’t like your arguments.” You didn’t pass.
Jonathan: When he wrote “The Birth of Tragedy” and is making this movement from philology to philosophy, he didn’t pass peer review. Everyone was like, “What the hell is this?”
Wolf: Yeah. And I’m not even talking about then, I’m talking about now, right? Then maybe the thing was healthier. And now, can you imagine trying to get any of his writings through academic philosophy peer review? It just wouldn’t fly because it’s like, “Oh, well, you need to provide more detail in that argument,” where it’s like, “No, that’s actually between me and the reader,” right?
Shared objectivity and intellectual scaffolding (48:22)
Wolf: And I think the humanities are especially difficult in this way because they’re especially distant from the sort of obvious objectivity of some other science. It’s like mathematics, it’s like, well, the proof either works or it doesn’t, right? Now, there’s some wishy-washiness around the edge where people will publish proofs that are true, but they screwed up part of it, and—
Jonathan: I think a lot of that—
Wolf: But mathematics is much more sort of ideal in that way than the humanities is.
Jonathan: I sometimes wonder—
Wolf: The humanities is very difficult
Jonathan: how much of this is a question of how much sort of effective social process and shared understanding has been built up around a field, if a sense of shared objectivity doesn’t sort of spring directly from the field itself. So let us imagine that you are a modern pure mathematician, and you drop yourself into ancient Greece or something. And you’re going to go and you’re going to make your arguments to the mathematicians of the time and be like, “No, this is objectively correct.” I think you’re going to have one hell of an uphill battle.
Wolf: Well, yeah, because mathematics at the time was much closer to the humanities. It was about making arguments that people found convincing. Now, they did a lot of digging into why these things were true, why these arguments were convincing, and they got into that. I think you could have a dialogue with them and come to a shared understanding of what it means to have a proof and why certain arguments work and certain arguments don’t work. They did invent mathematics, right?
It’s not like trying to explain it to the Romans or something, which maybe would be much more alien.
Jonathan: My point is this. I think maybe the sense of shared objectivity kind of comes out of the collected metis and practice—of your society and civilization. And if you were talking to a Roman about military affairs, I think if we take Napoleon and we drop him into the Roman—Roman Republic at some point, I think that with a lot of people, he will be able to briefly sketch some set of military logic or the reason why it’s good or not good to do certain things, and there will be this feeling of immediate click. And a sense of shared objectivity.
Wolf: I think the same would be true with mathematics in ancient Greece, and for the same reason, actually, which is that we get our mathematics from ancient Greece, and Napoleon in particular gets his military way of thinking from ancient Rome. Let’s not forget, he spent his time studying the battles of the Romans. And let’s not forget, in mathematics, they taught mathematics with Euclid until—the 19th century. So we very much are in their tradition.
Jonathan: But my point is just in conversations in our scene, you will see a lot of things kind of taken for granted. And so occasionally, someone will say something that’s new, and everyone will go like, “Oh, yeah, that sounds right.” In a similar way that to a mathematician in an audience of other mathematicians can begin to sketch something and then make it’s like dot, dot, dot, and everyone’s like, “Oh, yeah, we can all infer the gap there.” And so objectivity can be sketched briefly when people have a pretty large shared set of knowledge. And that to me is kind of a sign of when things start working well is when novelty, good forms of novelty can be presented without this extremely laborious process of everyone kind of being brought along.
Because you have this educational baseline.
Wolf: Is it possible for that ever to be—yeah, the educational baseline is important, but I think in, let’s say, the more difficult end of the humanities especially, the difference is that it’s inherently much less empirically sensitive. In military affairs, there’s a fact of the matter of who wins battles and how you win battles and stuff like this. And that shared field of objectivity creates the shared frame of analysis. And same thing in mathematics. There’s a fact of the matter of which things are true—with respect to which other things
Jonathan: But what about music?
Wolf: Well, let me put that aside for a minute. We’ll get there. I just want to talk about say philosophy or something, which doesn’t have that same fact of the matter. Philosophy is much more it’s about how are we to approach the most fundamental constructions of our way of even approaching the world, and it does ultimately connect to reality. But it connects to the reality in these ways that are sort of subject to only its own judgment.
The way I would maybe measure that connection to the world is, well, does it lead to life? Does it achieve life as the fundamental pattern of some system of life, whether it’s a civilization or an individual or something?
But it’s inherently because it involves leaps of faith that are not empirical, it’s these one-time bets, right? They’re not objective things. They’re about hunches, they’re about possibilities, and they’re ultimately only judged by God. And so it’s this very difficult or judged by reality or nature, however you want to frame that. It’s this very difficult thing, and I think for that reason, the humanities is inherently more difficult as a field of objectivity than other things.
As for music, I think somehow there seems to be this shared understanding of what sounds good, but there’s also this tradition. It is a culture. It’s a matter of culture. It’s a matter of reference and working within forms and grammars and so on. There’s also a lot of objectivity too.
Obviously, it’s not purely just like we feed you sounds, and we sort of see what you think of them. There’s this objectivity to tones and semitones and notes and chords and octaves and all this stuff, right? An octave is a physical fact, right? It’s like well this octave is twice as the frequency—is literally mathematically twice that, right? And so I’m curious how you account for the matter of music.
But I would say it’s somewhere in between, right? It’s got elements of objectivity, but it’s got elements of just people—cultural artistry
Jonathan: I think in order for something to be appealing and sensible to your society, it has to have some form to it. You can do away with—a lot of form, and then you’re pushing people’s boundaries. If we looked at something like, say, “The Rite of Spring” which famously the musicians really hated it when they started to learn it, but then they learned to love it. One of my favorite aphorisms from Nietzsche is Aphorism 334 of “The Gay Science,” “One must learn to love,” where he says that—we hear things that we’re unfamiliar with poorly, that we don’t know—how to distinguish them clearly. If you’re hearing a foreign language, he believes that your mind is always trying to push it into the categories of the known, and you literally need to learn the skill of distinguishing and delimiting the parts of it before you can start to apprehend how they coherently assemble.
And he also believes that this is true of new music and new forms of music. And I think that is borne out by the history of music. That it takes you time to learn to love things, to actually see the movements of form embedded within whatever the artist is doing on a creative level.
Wolf: Yeah, and to see what they’re doing. Right. At first, it might just sound like noise until you realize, no, wait, there’s something there. There’s structure that can be appreciated. In some ways, it’s like language, right?
And this is to the extent to which music ends up adjacent to the humanities, is there’s a language, it’s almost a literature. It’s like we take these objective relationships between sound or subjective relationships between sounds and compose them as if they were language into poetic or artistic expressions of something. I don’t know music as well as I know other things. But—
Epistemic accessibility of the humanities (57:30)
Jonathan: Within that world, I have this worry that it’s very important to know how much of a given problem comes from what. And I think that the complexity of the world tends to mean that a lot of things have several causes, and if one cause seems very entrenched—then you’re like, well, that’s just a part of how reality is. But if there’s an exacerbating factor, and you’re not accounting for the exacerbating factor, then this inherent fact of reality seems all the worse. So it’s like, let’s say they’re dispositionally a melancholic person. They have a tendency towards depression.
And you’re like, well, they’re a depressed person. And you have written that into the world, and then you’re not really thinking about it. You’re not trying to pry open the—
Wolf: Right. You’ve reified some tendency that you’ve described into—a fact, and worse, an identity fact.
Jonathan: And it could be the case that they are a depressed person, but the scale of their depression is because things X, Y, Z are going wrong with their life that there is actually room—for intervention here. And so you could get someone from 80% depressed to just 20% depressed, and it’s just a much better situation, and their life could be going that much smoother. I worry that we’re in this position in the world of philosophy and the humanities, where it is true that I think there is something inherently more difficult about or less accessible to this immediate pure participation. But I actually think the situation is dramatically exacerbated because of this confusion of tongues. Because, in fact, we don’t all speak Latin and Greek anymore, and there’s a lot of other things you should be aware of, like that the tradition has become very large while the educational institutions have broken down.
Mathematics and the liberal arts (59:33)
Jonathan: So it’s very difficult for someone—
Wolf: I guess another element of it is just that the humanities are much more alienated from mathematics. And I think a lot of the rigor and the possibility of objectivity within the humanities comes from things like mathematics. And this was Plato’s original point in including mathematics in the education of the philosophers is, there’s multiple things going on there, including the utility of mathematics in war, but one of his points was that mathematics reliably orients the mind towards the truth.
And not just the practical truth of everyday approximations, but the ultimate truth of what he calls the higher things.
Jonathan: I think that mathematics was a very good litmus test for that kind of orientation in the ancient world, in a society that wasn’t a heavily mathematical society. I would say that if—
Wolf: I think it’s even more important now, especially because we do less mathematics in conjunction with the humanities. The humanities is less rigorous and less mathematical than it ought to be. Now, I’m not talking about the so-called social sciences, which is where they attempted to approach these humanity matters directly as trying to put graphs and equations on things. What I’m talking about is somehow the training of the mind that comes from being good at mathematics. You know what a good argument is.
You know what a good concept is.
Jonathan: But that would—
Wolf: You know the language of reality, and so then when you hit things in the more mysterious or the more difficult matters where we haven’t or it cannot be tracked out with rigorous mathematical concepts, you at least have this reference point of orientation. I think that really does matter.
Jonathan: I think there’s going to be an interesting question of whether or not one believes that the world fundamentally is math in some sense. I would disagree with that pretty strongly.
Wolf: I’m not saying the world is math.
Jonathan: I think it is a reference point.
Wolf: I’m saying that math is an extremely valuable reference point on what reason can do.
Jonathan: But most educated people in our society will at least have a grasp on the basics of calculus, which is far in advance.
Wolf: Do you think that’s true?
Jonathan: Well, I don’t know.
Wolf: I certainly come from the more mathematical background, more so than I come from the humanities, but someone who’s—
Jonathan: Let’s just say that a lot of—
Wolf: Okay. They understand that there’s such a thing as a derivative, maybe.
Jonathan: We have a lot of people in our society.
Wolf: I don’t know. People always overestimate—
Jonathan: Our level of mathematical technics as a society blows the ancient Greeks out of the water. That’s clear.
Wolf: Well, no, but that’s different from any particular class actually knowing that stuff. Like yes, our math wizards are extremely impressive. What I’m getting at is that—
Jonathan: And are the math wizards more oriented towards the ultimate truth—than maybe than the baseline of society. But no, I think—
Wolf: So what I’m—
Jonathan: I think a lot of math wizards are themselves—
Wolf: I don’t think it—
Jonathan: kind of naive servants of the system.
Wolf: Yeah, I don’t think it does it on its own. I’m not saying math makes you enlightened. You still need the liberal arts. My point is that math is one of the liberal arts, and it is necessary to the liberal arts.
Jonathan: I agree. I agree with that.
Wolf: And the thing, it is, as far as I know, last I checked, a historical objective fact that intellectual elites were much more unified between the mathematical and the philosophical, or the literary, the humanities let’s say 100 years ago much more so than now. And now, I think the sort of so-called expert elites of the humanities are less mathematically literate than their predecessors, and this is part of why their thing is more corrupt. And meanwhile, I think the reason that tech is a rising, like so-called tech is a rising class, is that they are more technically literate. And also, people comment that tech people who are primarily working in mathematical and engineering, and scientific fields have more interest in literature and the humanities than the humanities people have in technical matters. So I think that’s interesting, and that’s why they’re a rising class.
They’re not in charge, certainly not yet, but I think there’s something to that. And so there’s this... This is maybe a tangent in our overall discussion, but I do think Plato was correct about the role of mathematics in the liberal arts.
Jonathan: I do think that math has to be part of the liberal arts. I do think that there is a... I don’t know. As you know, I’m a big believer in quality. And I think if you can’t detect the feeling of a new quality as you explore conceptual space or think of new possibilities, you end up being quite lost.
And I—
Wolf: That’s precisely what you learn from mathematics. That’s the thing. I think people use the language of quality or the concept of quality as distinct from quantity or well-tracked conceptual ground.
I think there’s something very true to that. You have to be able to reason about that, but I think it’s like people often use that as an excuse not to understand or not to have the rigorous background that would enable you to do that. And I think the mathematical basis—actually strengthens your thought in so many ways because you know what a strong concept is. You know what a conceptual breakthrough looks like, and in these very objective terms, right? Whereas in—
Jonathan: Well, if I may, in the words of sage Kanye West, “Everything is exactly the same.” And I believe very strongly, I really do believe very strongly that all of these traditions that we hope to enable through philosophy, through the building of new institutions, through the humanities, these new perspectives on beauty where you have the pinnacles and hopefully new developments within the world of literature or music or whatever it is. That the practitioners of those traditions within their own domains are encountering, on their own terms, some of the most sophisticated products of the human race that require very refined sensibilities, that require exactly the kind of attitude that you’re saying mathematics can help develop. So I believe that it is the role of someone who is pursuing a certain kind of philosophy or a certain kind of interpretive and organizational role within their society to recognize how deep and how sophisticated and subtle and, in some sense, objective a lot of these traditions really are. And so the best musicians, I think, are unveiling the truth.
I think they’re unveiling—the truth—
Wolf: There’s some subject matter there that’s real
Jonathan: which is unitary, and I think they are, whether they know it or not, it’s like they’re not doing what they’re doing by means of math as a practice. It might involve math, it might not. But mathematics could help cast light on it, as could a lot of other—
Wolf: There is some relation between music and mathematics. Everyone’s known this forever.
Renewal and crossdisciplinarianism (1:08:15)
Jonathan: I just really want people who are thinking about education to believe in the pantheon of the traditions, and because this is kind of the opposite of like we should all be, especially if we’re pursuing this kind of interpretive role in our society, a little bit chagrined about our failures here and there. But I am very wary of a mindset I see people adopt sometimes, which is like, well, if we can’t get back to this broad baseline of liberal education and everyone gets the quadrivium and the trivium, then like, well, what are we even doing if we can’t restore that baseline? And that to me is like a kind of—
Wolf: Well, it sounds defeatist
Jonathan: it’s a defeatist mentality. And I think if we’re taking the humanities to have something to do with the admiration and study of mankind, and then when you see people performing at their best within the arts or within literature, that is the pinnacle of the thing you’re looking for, and they will have gotten there by all kinds of strange byways. So I just think that I want people to believe not only that they should try and be educated to make all things human less alien to them, but also to believe that if you are in one of the most noble traditions, if you believe that your tradition is one of the most noble, you are actually pursuing one of the most objective things in the world. It’s just esoteric to everyone else. And you might even be out beyond what some of your peers can see—
Wolf: Well, if we can—
Jonathan: as objective
Wolf: come back to the matter of how does a new sort of revolutionary academic class renew the project, one of the ways to do that that I think is very fruitful is to find new ways to discern what are those objective qualities within each field of knowledge and relate them to each other. And because part of the problem is within any given institutional landscape, the way the thing has been carved with the specializations and so on, you get differing amounts of, let’s say, objectivity within each field, they call it. You get different areas within the field that are differently objective. You get some things in social psychology that are completely real and worthy of study, and other things that are just total bullshit and nonsense.
But the current system, by the way it has carved the turkey, is not able to make those distinctions. It just says, “Oh yeah, these things have different qualities.” There’s no sort of ground from which physics can criticize social psychology, or there’s no ground from which, I don’t know, any other kind of relation between the fields.
The idea of even having meter in poetry has become problematized. And in some sense, the way the system has carved itself up and the way that it’s insulated itself from criticism means that it is full of fluff. It’s full of crap. And so one of the jobs to do is to come in and say, “Okay, we have enough of a holistic picture of...” Not necessarily like we’re all Renaissance men and we know the deep wisdom of every topic, but we can start to discern which parts are actually real and relate those to each other in new ways.
And that’s one of the big jobs. Well, I think it’s Confucius calls this the rectification of names. Or it’s related to that concept. And this relates to what you’re saying, I guess, which is as you go and try to understand the objective core of each sort of tradition within our overall set of traditions, they sometimes need to be cleaned off quite a lot, cleaned of all the cruft that has been built up or has displaced them or has become cancerous and it can no longer see itself objectively. And I think one of the best ways to do that is novel connections or restoring connections between different fields that were connected—or ought to be connected or are connected and have been disconnected.
And so that’s the spirit in which I offer that the mathematics is one of the humanities, is that those things have been alienated for a little too long. We’ve got a humanities that is about moral posturing instead of about nature. And a lot of that is because it’s not in dialogue with the right fields.
Jonathan: I often think many of these fields are not even in dialogue with themselves. That again, there’s this lack of a desire for conflict that actually comes from feeling like you share a passion together. And I think if we view these traditions as in some sense living things, which I think they are, there’s a question of how they agree with themselves, which is not exactly the same question as their sort of possession of discursive knowledge. What I mean—
Contact with reality (1:14:20)
Wolf: Can I offer an idea on that, which is that the passion and having a shared ground that’s not just pure self-reference to argue about comes from the connection to some larger holistic reality. And it’s like, we’re passionate about music, not just because music is this own sort of self-contained discursive system in which we can derive musical products. Why does any of that matter? Well, it’s because it’s part of human life. It’s because it has this effect on the larger thing, because it relates to other fields in these ways.
And so I think the fields lose themselves to the extent that they also lose contact with reality.
Jonathan: I think, and this relates to my kind of admiration for certain kinds of single intensive focus. I believe that you don’t, in the truly ultimate sense, you only need to have clarity about one thing to have clarity about reality. I think if you are doing an extraordinary job at whatever it is you are doing, you have contact with reality. I would say that these fields actually—don’t have pure enough self-reference
Wolf: you can apply that inference the other way, which is that to have the purest understanding of the field is it requires the contact with reality. And I’m not saying with everything else, with all the other detail. I mean that there’s some objective nature to the field, or there’s some objective utility of the field, or some thing beyond itself which grants it reality and gives it its structure. I think this is necessary to all of these things. I don’t think any of them stand alone.
Traditional philosophers have sort of mentioned that all knowledge must be in contact with God in some sense, right? And that’s maybe what I’m talking about. But I see what you mean.
Maybe here’s a way of putting it. You can find the whole universe in any given field, right? Or to study it fully—is going to have all this depth and reality to it that’s going to make it a rich field and a rich way of looking at the world. But I think it’s not actually isolated. A lot of the truth that a master musician discovers is a lot of the same truth that—a mathematician will touch on, that a philosopher will touch on, that a historian will touch on—that an artist will touch on.
There’s these overlaps, right?
So I think that one of the errors that’s made today is the insulation of these fields—from relation to each other.
Jonathan: I think that a lot of that insulation is driven by the absence of people energetically making those connections. I think no one should feel too much like they have to explain themselves or get into this habit of—well, justifying your utility to society is kind of a dead end.
Wolf: Yeah, yeah. It’s not about justifying. I’m just making observations about the shape of the actual—structure of the field.
Jonathan: This is related to our earlier discussion about people doing what is in some sense good work, but being in a position where they’re not truly supporting the future of their field or domain because there are these larger social problems or larger problems with what’s going to cause their tradition to continue. In a similar sense, I think you can have a lot of different ways of constructing really excellent poetry as a society. Obviously, the different societies have different forms of grammar, different forms of intonation, different things they can or can’t do practically. So it’s like the rules of poetry are going to vary, and I kind of ultimately think it’s up to the poets—to decide what the best rules are. But I think that we’re in a...
Nietzsche had a lot of interest in the decadent period of society, not just because of like, well, we’re in a period of decline and we need to fix things, but also because he saw it as a period of wasteful but generative exploration.
Where it’s a little like there are all of these poets, and a lot of things off the beaten track are happening, and there is a lot of experimentation happening in the world. And I think we all recognize that that experimentation is often not resonating with other people, or with the world, or with enough people, enough that it will become something that really continues, and that there’s this remarkable and joyful and truly excellent thing where if you create the right kind of thing, you are sharing it with hopefully all future generations. And that’s the most noble aim of art. But some of the things, I really believe that some of what our society is doing across the creative arts and in all of our weird... Someone like Nick Land has fallen pretty fall off the course in terms of what form should look like.
It’s like screaming on the ground during a lecture is a very experimental thing to be doing. That is, in a way, it’s a little like you’re way off meter. There’s no rhyme scheme here. Just something strange and just—Dionysian is just happening.
Wolf: You can’t allow fields to become defined by a rigid form. They have a lot of form, they have a lot of structure, but I think your point is that that’s a structuring of the passion from within. It’s not like, “Oh, we just cram it into this form, and then that makes it work.” And this is a lot of—
Jonathan: I think—
Wolf: the nature of the corruption of academia today is we cram it into the form of a bunch of people having a conference and a bunch of people sharing papers, but it’s actually not that thing at all, right?
“My whole philosophy of education” (1:21:25)
Jonathan: And I think this is my, in some sense, maybe even whole philosophy of education, is I personally just do not tend to focus on, well, you need to read X, Y, Z thing in a general sense. All of my thought, I think, in some way revolves around passion in some sense. And I think a lot of the role of anyone trying to build an educational institution is to actually do this thing of being a matchmaker, and finding conditions where people with different passions can harmonize with each other and create something together. Of saying, “You are super dialed in on whatever your thing is, but in the right contexts, you would find it extremely invigorating to play with others, to experiment with others, to find new forms of agreement, to agree on new forms with other people within your domain.” And it’s just very rare.
Yes, we could imagine the most noble individual is both extremely good at their tradition and also has the energy to be good at building institutional infrastructure, and very socially savvy. So they go and they find all the collaborators they want, and they pull them together, and this is like Goethe, basically. But in the absence of someone like that, we all have to bear each other’s burdens to some extent. Recreate Goethe in aggregate, if you will. And we have to go out and say, “Well, you’re very passionate about your thing. You need to be platformed and enabled and brought together with other people in a context where you can really collaborate with them.”
Because I think sustaining that kind of context is just deeply not trivial. And so this is sort of like I—
Wolf: So the problem is how to find people’s talents and passions and give them the right platform for that.
Jonathan: Give them the right platform, not just so they can collaborate a little bit, but so whatever is the real heart of their shared passion can actually start to burn strongly enough that it will be able to continue indefinitely.
Wolf: And that it can come out, and this is where the progress, this is where the value actually comes from, is giving them the right conditions to glow brightly.
Jonathan: Yeah. And I think to me, it’s like society, in some sense, what we really take from a lot of these things is a kind of warmth of like, here are people being truly human. Here are people experimenting, taking risks, out on the edge, dealing with the, in the most... A lot of art is dealing in the most almost dire way possible, the distinction between your own individuality and conceptual set and society—and finding really elegant vectors to solve for that. But society, it’s like if the fire is very small, society doesn’t get anything out of it, and it doesn’t create this interchange, and the fire dies out, and you become a historical footnote that maybe, hopefully, someone with a bright eye will pick up some old thread.
Wolf: Yeah, and this is sort of what our—
Jonathan: But it’s like, let’s not stay in this sad state where the river of our society, we’re turning into this just giant... We’re splitting up and going down a lot of different cracks. Something has to be done to, in a way that’s not at all reactionary.
Wolf: You have to get it all there. You have to get all the plutonium in one place for it to develop.
Jonathan: You have to get all the plutonium in the one place. Yeah.
Wolf: Where it’s not valuable.
Jonathan: And you have to start a critical reaction. And then I believe in just letting people being the force they are, but pulling them together in a way.
The only legitimate demands I think come from shared passion. And I mean legitimate in the sense of the person is going to go, “Oh, yes. Well, maybe I should know Latin.” That comes from a shared understanding of who you want to be. And then if we take this pantheon model of traditions, what we’re really looking for is finding unspoken, or maybe not spoken loudly enough, agreements about who we want to be or who some cluster of individuals really wants to be together, and creating the conditions where they can work that out and pursue that, and actually together recognize the kind of human being that they’re collectively trying to create.
So you can have a real—so you can have a tradition that actually carries into the future.
Wolf: Well, this has been a very productive topic, and I think we could go on forever on many dimensions of it. Maybe that means we’ll have to have another conversation.
Jonathan: I think the aim is to go on forever.
Wolf: I guess that is what we’re saying, but that means we should do it next time. This has been a lot of fun. Thanks, Jonathan, for sharing your wisdom on the topic, and it’s been very productive and interesting. I hope to continue digging into this because it’s very important. How do we actually understand the matter of the life of the mind?
How to create institutions of the mind? This is going to be a topic that, as The Students, obviously, we’re going to be covering quite a lot, hopefully. So, I’m excited for that, but I want to leave it here. I think this has been a lot of fun. Thank you.
Jonathan: Yeah. Thank you for having me on.