Significant Others - Stephen West on Philosophy

Episode Date: March 7, 2024

Creator and host of the podcast Philosophize This!, Stephen West, on how long-dead philosophers can still offer guidance in a modern world.

Welcome to Significant Others. I'm Liza Powell O'Brien, and in yesterday's episode, we learned about how Friedrich Nietzsche's work and legacy was distorted by his sister, Elizabeth. Today, to talk a little bit more with us about Nietzsche and the field of philosophy in general, I'm joined by Stephen West. Stephen, thank you for being here. But more importantly, thank you for your incredible podcast, Philosophize This. It was absolutely indispensable to me as I was working on this episode. And I feel like I had a lot less work to do because you had done so much of it, distilling the work of literally every philosopher ever into these easily digestible episodes. What led you to launch such a massive undertaking? Well, I didn't like my life. I was working at a warehouse doing manual physical labor for eight to 10 hours a day a lot of time. Prior to that, I was raised, I was taken by CPS when I was nine years old. And then I was put into group homes, foster homes, different houses of different family members.

And so, I mean, long story short, when I was 16 years old, I got kicked out of a long-term foster placement. And they gave me two options. They said, look, you can run away in the state of Washington at the time. You don't have to report somebody a missing person if they're over 16 years of age, or you can go and live with your mom in some other part of the country. And I hadn't talked to my mom in years. So the only option I had was to be homeless in my eyes. And so I started working and had to drop out of high school. So that left me in two, like a, I, I had two things that mattered to me. Then it was making a living and trying to resolve the trauma that I had in my past.

I was very self-aware of the fact that I was traumatized and I needed wise friends or mentors to try to give me some guidance and I didn't have anybody. So I literally Googled wisest person in the history of the world. And one of Plato's dialogues came up called Gorgias talking about a guy named Socrates and the Athenian Agora talking to people and the rest is history. I mean, I just have read or interpreted philosophy pretty much every day since it really has helped me develop myself. And so when I was about 25 years old, working at that warehouse for so long, I just, I,

I tried doing a podcast. I had friends that were telling me that, that I, they that they liked the passion that I had when I talked about it. So I just tried it out and people have really liked what I've done so far. I'm trying to wrap my head around this because as I experienced this podcast, I mean, when I found it, when I was working wanted a better, I've taken philosophy classes, but I, you know, not in the way where I have that kind of just like good handle on the different schools of thought and the different sort of, you know, main players. So you have just absorbed all of the information that you can find kind of almost in a hobbyist's pose and then are able to regurgitate it in a way that is both faithful to the reality and also very communicable to a layperson, for lack of a better word. Right? Well, I hope so.

That's the goal. I don't know if I accomplish that every episode, but yeah, I don't know if it's too indulgent to offer up more there, but I don't see my path as that far away from somebody that goes to a college that is pressured by their guidance counselor to select a major by their parents. They go to college. They're in a philosophy curriculum. They got certain teachers that teach them about philosophy. teachers that teach them about philosophy. I mean, there's a lot of professors out there that are part of those organized curriculums that write books because they dedicate their lives to causes that they really care about. If I read 10 books by 10 great professors that are the head of their curriculums, how is that much different than being a part of a curriculum at a local college? I'm not saying that it isn't different. I have a lot of respect for people that go through that. I'm merely trying to salvage some level of credibility here. Like I just, if you read enough. It's a hundred percent credible. No, but my, my perspective on it is I don't know that everyone, I think there are different,

obviously there are different ways of learning. And I don't know that everyone would be able to glean everything that you seem to have gleaned simply from reading. For example, personally, I very much rely on some kind of interpreter, you know, someone to sort of guide me through things. It's much more arduous for me to go straight to the source and then hack through it and really kind of get it on my own. And I think I'm just maybe a more like, and really kind of get it on my own. And I think I'm just maybe a more like, I don't know if it's audio learning or if it's, you know, that I'm very human focused or dependent on a, you know, a guide or whatever it is. But I think, I mean, what you're talking about is probably, you know, the original way that people did learn anything, right? It was just like, you write it down, someone reads it,

they take it, and they move forward. Yeah. And I don't think that the situations you'd be learning in are as manufactured back then. And I would just equate that to where I'm at. I think when it comes to learning anything, audio, visual, whatever, it being very important to you matters a lot. And this stuff was very important to me. It saved my life in many ways. It was the thing that helped me develop myself through all the slings and arrows of life. So yeah, I just think that I try to give that, I try to make a podcast that I would have wanted to listen to

as I was learning about it in the past. I have a follow-up question to all of this, which is not getting us any closer to the real point of this, which is not getting us any closer to the real point of this conversation. But because I interact with more, I'm not someone who was interested in reading history on my own. And then I signed myself up for this project where all I'm doing is reading history. And so it was a little bit news to me that how much the accounts, the historical accounts could differ, you know, between one author to the next on a subject that's very well covered. You know, I think, wow, there's a huge range of

interpretation that I find myself struggling to sort of reconcile. Do you run into that when you're, you know, reading? Are you only reading the original philosophers' texts themselves? Are you also reading other people's interpretation of coverage of analysis of them? Whenever I'm covering any new topic, I read everything. I read source texts, but I usually start with secondary sources.

I read blog posts. I watch YouTube videos. I read the comment sections of Reddit posts and YouTube videos. I think that's a big part of the understanding that you can get from something because you see the misconceptions that you might be making, but more that other people might be making. You can see's a big part of the understanding that you can get from something because you see the misconceptions that you might be making,

but more that other people might be making. You can see it from a lot of different perspectives at once. And I think just reading more and more different takes of it is generally a positive thing. But I mean, to your general point,

I mean, history is a set of lies that we all agree upon, they say, right? And history is always written by the people that conquered the people that came before. And that is something that i run into and it's a bit of a thing that causes discord just in like how i create these episodes i don't know if i should it is doing justice to history covering the narrative that is most accepted by people or

is doing justice taking it upon myself to engage with these historical texts in a novel way and try to suss out something new from them i don't know especially being a fan of philosophy as opposed to a historian i don't know what my responsibility is do you have anxiety as i do about getting something wrong yeah i mean that's huge for me and probably a you know to your point about lies like it's a fallacy that if there were a teacher, they would be able to answer the questions and, you know, settle the score properly. So I get very nervous when I'm on my own with all this stuff to just say like, well, this one disagrees with this one and I'm going to come down on this side. But I really get nervous drawing my own conclusions because, you know, what if I'm

just way off base? Yeah, I think that's a good attitude to have. At least this is what I tell myself when I do it. Like the fact that I'm worried about making that mistake probably is a good sign that I'm going to make less of them. Okay. So moving on to the Nietzsche family, sometimes people, you know, listen to these podcasts out of order, so I don't want to assume that someone has listened to the whole script that I hammered out about this. had kind of crafted this image of him or misappropriated his work after his death, which led to him being aligned in sort of public consciousness with fascism and German nationalism, which couldn't have been farther from his original ambition. And my question for you is to what degree or how did that discovery of her misappropriation play out as you understand it in the sort of world of philosophy or philosophers? I think because also of the style of his work where it was very aphoristic and he was not

trying to prescribe some organized doctrine about how to live life or anything like that. I think that there's a lot of different interpretations that still go on. People that dedicate their life to this can disagree on the most fundamental points of how to take the will to power, the ubermensch. I think most of the effect was in the court of public opinion. And I think that's still where it's still being sussed out. You ask the average person about Nietzsche, what they think about him. Nietzsche, what they think about him. They may know, they may see him, I think, inappropriately as a diehard atheist that was sort of heralding the death of God and telling everybody that they're stupid for believing in religion. Again, couldn't be further from the truth.

And I think when you align him with fascism and an atheist ideology like national socialism, I think that people can easily conflate his ideas with theirs. They can easily think that he, I mean, he was not a fan of values in the universe and living the best life that you possibly can. Mm-hmm. Yeah, and those declarations that he would make to your point about aphorisms really are asking to be, it's like advertising slogans almost, like asking to be interpreted in wildly different ways almost. Yeah, that's part of the skill of them. I think that some writers write their work thinking that, you know, in two generations from now, somebody may take this quote and apply it to the times that are going on then, and it'll have like a double meaning, like they can use it as a double entendre and i think that's part of the skill of people writing i i know that gui de bourne totally different philosopher uh would take quotes from marxist das kapital and reuse them because there's a direct

correlation between the society that he was talking about and post-world war ii western europe and back during marxist time anyway total aside no, no, that's great because I was actually, my next question is, are there other instances of, I mean, that's a big question. Are there other instances of someone's work being notably kind of misappropriated

or reinterpreted and applied in a way that's analogous to what went down with Nietzsche's sister? I'm sure there are. And I don't know if it's entirely not their fault. I think there's a lot of philosophers out there that write their work purposefully abstruse, purposefully inaccessible because they're terrified of the lay person misinterpreting their work because they don't understand the full context of it and then applying it in a broad public sense, like what happened to Nietzsche. And then their ideas going down as something that supports Nazi ideology.

I mean, Plato's maybe the most famous example of this. People think that he wrote esoterically for the academics and the philosophers of the future and then exoterically for the public. So it's tough to really suss out whether he truly believed in something like the republic where there was an ideal society that we could craft with a philosopher king at the top of it and how much of that is just metaphorical like his tales about atlantis and such you mentioned earlier plato and socrates and only because i'm not sure how clear the average person is on who Plato was, who Socrates was, but because they are always linked in our understanding of philosophy. Could you just do a little primer for us on who they were and how they interacted? Yeah, Socrates was a man who was convicted to death in 399 BC for corrupting the youth were the charges that were brought about him.

He was a guy that rejected social norms on a level that, I mean, in terms of the historical record is unprecedented. He was a really unique guy. He walked around and accosted people in the public square, questioning them about things. And he was looking for wise people. He was always looking to learn. He famously said, the only thing I know is that I know nothing. In fact, we don't really know anything that socrates said actually it's all through the work

of plato and plato is his most famous student he's the founder of what's called the academy that's where we get that word that we use today um and he was really if socrates was as cicero put it the man that took philosophy down from the heavens and put it into the lives of men and women. Then Plato was the guy that really built off of Socrates' example and created the first Western philosophical system that people still use to this day. It's just two great thinkers living back to back. That's about it. And is your understanding that the dialogues that Plato wrote between Socrates and the students were fictionalized or sort of reportage or a combination of both? Plato was one of them. So it's tough to know, especially with what I was talking about before, the distinction between esoteric writing and exoteric. It's tough to know how much of these are real accounts of conversations that he heard and how much of it is him using and evoking Socrates as the quintessential wise person in a play or a dialogue that just represents Plato's ideas themselves or the ideas of some other person that was prominent at the time. It's tough to know, and it's still being debated. I don't think we'll ever find out, though. That's okay. More to talk about.

In that vein, the world of philosophy feels like such fertile territory for a conversation about significant others in terms of people who have impacted other people, for example. Sounds like there would maybe be no Plato without Socrates. Are there other pairings of philosophers who come to mind for you who were particularly entwined or responsible for each other's work in some way? Voltaire and Rousseau are notoriously enemies. I mean, Voltaire is one of my favorite philosophers, and just him using humor to make fun of Rousseau and all of the overly religious ideas that he was bringing to the table at the time, or that's how he was presenting them. I don't think Voltaire would have possibly had as many things to make fun of if it weren't for Rousseau. think he made russo better in his writing that's such a great version of a significant partnership is uh adversarial and sort of um satirical almost relationship that's great yeah when i first heard the concept of your show and my wife is a huge fan of your show so she was telling me about it she was saying that you know this is like the unheard story of the person behind the scenes that doesn't get the credit but they are responsible for the work in some way it's brought like their existence is brought to bear and right i i thought

it was so creative when you didn't need your sister because you know she's really a world-class scumbag like that is her contribution she really was and and one of the books that i read about her made the point that you know he hit this big idea of his this will to power which she misappropriated to her own ends basically she was a climber she wanted to be famous she wanted to have a lot of you know money and influence and so she completely abused her ill brother and that she was the example of someone whose own personal will to power in a certain sense was absolutely not what he had intended. But she was like the perfect case study of how his ideas could be misused. She was, you know, there's this picture of her when she's 15, I think, on the cover of this book, and she's staring at the camera and like her eyes have so much force in them.

It's terrifying. Yeah, yeah, it is. I mean, one human being is a terrifying thing if they're sufficiently committed to ruining somebody's life or if they're desperate and opportunistic enough to take advantage of his work. I mean, that's the thing. If you're an outsider and you hear that Nietzsche's sick and you hear that his family is going to take control of his estate and they're going to be responsible for how his ideas are distributed,

you'd think from the outside that they're going to have the best intentions. They're going to have his best interests in mind. But in fact, a desperate person can do horrible things. And that is quite true. Are there other stories? And if not, it's fine. But if there are other stories that come to mind for you, again, from this sort of world of people who were not necessarily intellectual compatriots, but someone who's more in the vein of Tolstoy's wife, for example, who was, you know, influential in an almost invisible way to us now, like, rather than Voltaire Rousseau, more like, you know, who is making their sandwiches, you know, that kind of question.

Right. I wish I knew more. I don't. I unfortunately am a byproduct of the education that I've had. And I think the presence of women and sidekicks throughout history have not really been part of the narrative. I think it's a lot about this creative genius man that comes along and changes the world in his image. And we look up to that and it's amazing. And that's what we model ourselves after. So, yeah, i think that it's important work what you're doing um and i unfortunately don't have much to contribute well i think you're contributing plenty but um i'm i'm uh asking you to do my job for me is what

i'm doing so that's a good idea totally fine take the next episode from the episode you're doing that's yeah yeah you already sort of answered this question but who are your favorite philosophers you said you love voltaire and you obviously are very indebted to plato yeah i mean i i think different philosophers resonated with me at different periods of my life nicha is definitely top five there's one person that i have a bust of on my mantle and that is Nietzsche. But that, I think in my life today, I don't really think of Nietzsche's ideas too much. I think that they helped me during a period and then I've sort of moved on. My favorite philosophers that I reference the most now are Simone Weil and Kierkegaard, the last six months or so of my life. And I mean, Simone de Beauvoir is my number one um and aside from that

i mean schopenhauer is really great because he's so pessimistic and i just like arguing against him in my head um montaigne is really great because he just writes these essay forms a very humanizing relatable things that you know even hundreds of years later you can see yourself in montaigne and what he's going through and yeah i mean, Bergstone is a really big one for me. Just process philosophy in general, I think is fascinating. These are the big ones. That's great. And I was also planning to ask you who, if anyone, you consider to be a significant other for you. And you've already answered that question so beautifully and surprisingly. I will not make you answer it again unless there's something else that you want to add about a person or a thing that was particularly formative or helpful

for you. Wait, who was the significant other before? Was it just the whole childhood experience? Yes, exactly. Exactly. I can't personify that into a person if i did i would hate them right no i'm just kidding i've come to peace with all of that um no i oh you so so you're asking for a philosopher that's sort of a kindred spirit or anything that was just really more you know sometimes i say to people who they'll bring up a teacher or a spouse or you you know, a friend or something. But it sounds like this, the whole kind of, you know, universe of philosophers have really been, you know, your guideposts through life, which is profound. Yeah, and I think they helped me through a lot of hard stuff. But then eventually you get past the existential dread and it's just about finding a reason to apply yourself to life and continue waking up life is an iterative thing you show up

every day and you just do the best that you can and then enough days of that in a row and you've lived a good life and you've affected people around you in a good way and i i would be remiss if i didn't say my wife here i mean i met her two and a half years ago and she is just the most alive person that I've ever met. She is incredibly kind and smart. She's a quantum physicist. Oh my goodness. I mean, so anytime I'm talking about anything

in my podcast that has to do with science or physics, I mean, two rooms away doing her work is somebody that's like a genius at this stuff. She is just, she is, it sounds so cliche, but it's how I think about it.

It's like she, she just makes everything a little brighter when she's around and it makes me, it allows me to stay focused and it allows me to stay present,

which is tough. I mean, you're up in your head thinking about philosophy all the time and you can be caught in the abstract. You can be keeping yourself at arm's length from everything, rationalizing everything. And she's just so present and in the moment all the time that it just smacks me upside the head and gets me back there. And I don't think I'd be doing the podcast as well

as I am right now if it wasn't for her what speaking of the podcast what is do you worry you're gonna run out of material I mean like at a certain point you're gonna catch up right to to where we are now in time are you are there just endless lists of of people for you to cover yeah there's just a I'm there's a lot of relevant philosophical work being done today that's super interesting. In fact, the most recent series I've been doing is on the philosophy of mind and contemporary discussions around consciousness and, uh,

things like artificial intelligence and intentionality. And so, I mean, even that I could do it for the next two years if I wanted to, and still not run out of content, but I won't, uh, I don't think I'll ever run out to answer your question.

Well, that's a relief because I don't want it to end. Um, do you have anything more you wanted to add on the subject of nietzsche or his sister or do you think we covered everything i mean if i could just give a just a slight reinterpretation of his work because it's one thing to say that it was appropriated by the nazis it's another thing to talk about the specific ideas that were misappropriated i think if you're a nazi and you're coming across nietzsche's work and you've never read philosophy before, and you don't understand the scope of what

he's trying to do, I think you can think, oh, so the Ubermensch, this is the next evolution of human being that, you know, as he says, ape is to man as man is to the Ubermensch. So that must be what a Nazi is. We have now ascended to the next evolution of humanity. I hear something like the will to power. And when I talk to my friends and I say the word power, that means a certain thing colloquially. Like, I know what power means. And of course, that's translated. But it's just power is a word that Nietzsche utilized because philosophers are always working within the confines of the language of their time. But they're talking about concepts that are ineffable sometimes. But they have to defineines of the language of their time, but they're talking about concepts that are ineffable sometimes,

but they have to define them using the language of their time. So he picks the German equivalent of the word power. And of course, a Nazi would misappropriate that, but he obviously meant something much more complicated. And there's the eternal recurrence. There's many other aspects of his work that can be misunderstood. I guess I just see it as a word of caution to anybody that's trying to understand anything. It's so easy to misunderstand what

somebody's saying by reading in your biases into what they're saying. When you're reading Plato, for example, this guy lived 2000 years ago. He may as well have lived on a totally different planet than you live on. I mean, you can think there's an underlying humanity and I'll understand what he's talking about, but really it's a bit heavy-handed to do that. I think you got to read, I mean, when you read a passage from the Bible, there's biblical exegesis that theologians do. They interpret the passage within the context of the time it was written, within the context of our own culture. And there's a version of that in philosophy called hermeneutics, where it's the interpretation of a philosophical text where you consider everything the history the culture that brought it to bear the i mean even down to the

mood of the philosopher as they were writing it what local issues were important to them at the time i just think if we're ever trying to understand anything do the legwork of really trying to understand the context that it was written in, because we run the risk of emboldening a Nazi movement. I mean, that's the example here, but it could be even worse next time. Well, and as I understand it, the Nazis, I mean, I'm using that phrase very liberally, but there were very specific people within the German Nationalist Party who were focused on Nietzsche's writing and what they could kind of do with it. And most of them didn't really even read it. It was more sort of these headings or these concepts that they caught wind of. So there's that danger. And then also, I think one of the points you're bringing

up that I find really fascinating because I'm a writer is translation. And I think there's, you know, it's vastly underappreciated how important it is to consider the sort of malleability of language and how it doesn't align exactly from, you know, one language to another. And it's such a great reminder that you're giving us to, It's such a great reminder that you're giving us to not only try to educate ourselves about the place from which a set of ideas came, but also that how they're being expressed is very, I don't know if fungible is the right word, but it's not a direct line of communication intellectually. And that if I heard a great quote recently that JK Rowling actually said, which was that she thinks we should be most suspicious of ourselves when we are most certain. And I thought that was an excellent way to put it. I think that's part of what you're reminding us of here, which is all of this is so great. It's so useful. I'm still staggered, by the way, that this is all self-taught, essentially. And I know that, you know, yes, that's the point of these texts is that they're meant to be read and for people to make use of them. But I really think it's unusual that someone would be able to do it to the degree

that you've done. So anyway, my hat is off to you. I'm very impressed. I'm super flattered coming from a woman of your prestige. Oh, please. I just care a lot, I guess. And like I said before, it was a matter of life and death to me. So when you're put with your back against the wall like that, I think you do what needs to be done. And hopefully I make it a little easier for people to do it.

Because that's the other side of this. I have slogged over these texts for 15, 20 years now. So I'm trying to make this a little easier for the next generation, hopefully. That's great. Well, I hope everyone takes a listen

and keeps coming back to it because we have a lot to learn from it. Stephen West, thank you so much. This has really been a pleasure. Thank you for having me. Join us next week on Significant Others to find out which genre-defining composer's most recognizable tune was actually written by someone else.

Significant Others is produced by Jen Samples. Our executive producers are Nick Liao, Adam Sachs, Jeff Ross, and Colin Anderson. Engineering and sound design by Eduardo Perez, Rich Garcia, and Joanna Samuel. Music and scoring by Eduardo Perez

and Hannes Brown. Research and fact-checking by Michael Waters and Hannah Sio. Special thanks to Lisa Berm, Jason Chalemi, and Joanna Solitaroff. Talent booking by Paula

Davis and Gina Batista.