Ideas Have Consequences: The Philosophers Who Shaped 2020

well it's my pleasure to address the knights of malta at your national gathering you're a group that i've admired uh over the years so thank you for your invitation you know in recent weeks and months as our country goes through this convulsive time i can't tell you how many people have asked me bishop what is going on what how do you explain what's happening on our streets what's happening with the rhetoric people are using what's going on in our culture well there's been all kinds of analyses you know political and economic and sociological but you know by training an instinct i'm a philosopher and philosophers always ask the fundamental questions i think to understand what's going on we have to put on our philosopher's caps and so what i want to do with you in the talk today is look at this question philosophically by stepping back a bit from it i'm going to propose to you four thinkers two germans from the 19th century two frenchmen from the 20th century who have been extraordinarily influential on the way we think and the way we act today and i think understanding um these philosophers will help us understand what's happening in our time now the four i've got in mind i'll do them chronologically first karl marx secondly friedrich nietzsche thirdly jean-paul saath and finally michel foucault marx nietzsche sartre and foucault i think to understand their philosophies is to understand a lot of what's going on in the academy today and also now on the streets so let's begin with karl marx undoubtedly the best known of these four figures now many of us who lived through the events of the 1980s and 1990s with the downfall of the soviet union and the soviet bloc and so on might be forgiven for thinking that marx was going to be placed on the you know ash heap of history but marx has been taught now for the past at least 50 years in most of the academies of the west and as you know he's undergoing a sort of revival today especially among the young and i think marxism explains at least a fair amount of what's going on today just a bit about marx personally he was born in trier in the western part of germany in the year 1818 descended on both sides of his family by the way from a long line of rabbis and and you will see something of the biblical prophet i think in marx and and something of a though transformed and bent out of shape a kind of religious view of things as a young man he studies the fashionable hegelianism of the time and then very quickly drifts into radical politics first in germany also in belgium and france he lived for a time in paris because of his agitations he was expelled from those three countries eventually finds his way to more tolerant england and he settles in london that's where he spends the rest of his life and where he writes his major work the famous das capitao in fact if you go to the british museum they'll show you to this day the desk and the chair where mark sat and wrote dusk capital he dies in london in 1883 and he's buried in highgate cemetery there i suppose you need no encouragement for me to see the extraordinary impact that marx had throughout the 20th century and up till today politically speaking now there are a lot of themes in marx's thought that we could pursue i mean he's one of the most written about figures in western culture i'll just look at a couple the first theme in marx i'll look at is his atheism now the young marx was a devotee of a man named ludwig feuerbach and feuerbach is quite rightly called the father of modern atheism most atheists you read today are echoing themes in feuerbach foyerbach said that we human beings have a tendency to project outside of ourselves and idealize self-understanding so you know i'm intelligent but i'd like to be all intelligent i'm i'm loving but i'd like to be all loving i've got some power boy if i had all power so we take this idealized self-understanding myself as all-powerful all-knowing all-loving and we project it outward we call it god and then we spend our kind of pathetic religious lives petitioning this fictitive this fictional character to give back to us what we gave to him so firebox sees religion as a kind of alienation it's a psychological problem well young karl marx takes this in and all his life long he remains a devotee of feuerbach in fact he said famously everyone must be baptized in the foyer bach and that means in german the the brook of fire so everyone's got to go through this this baptism into foyer box atheism okay but marx asked a further question namely how come we human beings almost universally think of how universally applicable religion is around the world why do we do it why do we engage in this alienating move marx's extremely influential answer was because we are already so unhappy and so alienated in our economic lives because we're so oppressed we invent a fantasy world to live in hence his famous line religion is the opium of the people so it actually was in marx's time in in places like london that these opium dens were opening up people would you know retreat from the world they take opium they live in a fantasy world they destroy their lives in the process so marx said that's most human beings they take the opium of religion to dull their sensitivity to their suffering and to invent a fantasy world so marx's very influential view of what religion is and why we engage in it now this gives us a clue too and this is the second major idea i want to develop because it's hugely impactful today religion is part of what marx calls the superstructure so every society from ancient times to the present day marx thought has a substructure which is always economic whether it's the slave economy the ancient world the feudal economy of the medieval world a surf based economy in in russia of the 18th century and then the capitalist economy of his own time that's the core or the sub-structure of any society but the substructure throws up around itself what he calls the superstructure the superstructure has one purpose it is to enhance and protect the substructure that's its purpose now what's the superstructure everything else in the society so mark says for example um politics what's the whole purpose of politics and we surround it with you know all sorts of uh descriptions and honors and and we we look at in a very exalted way but what's the purpose of politics is to protect the economic substructure he would say what do most politicians talk about most of the time but economic matters what's the purpose of the military which serves political interests well as to protect the the capitalist system to expand uh markets and to protect them in foreign environments etc what are wars fought over marx said always over economic matters what's entertainment's purpose well to distract us from our suffering which is why rich people often support forms of entertainment there it's a bit like religion the opium of the people how about the arts well the arts are part of the superstructure the arts are you know for the most part subsidized by wealthy people and the arts over the centuries tend to glorify those in the power structure okay substructure protected by this elaborate superstructure now what's the point of the marxist intellectual is to break through the superstructure to expose it for what it is to break its its power over us so that we can get at the economic substructure and fight to revolutionize it but see we can't foster the revolution until we break through the superstructure now here's the something just to kind of beguile you we all know the wizard of oz you know there's a very marxist way to read the wizard of oz where you've got the tin uh woodsman who stands for industry that has no heart you've got the cowardly lion well he's the military that has no real courage you've got the um scarecrow he's he's the farmer that has no brains but the one i find really interesting on this marxist reading of the wizard of oz is the man behind the curtain so here's this little figure who's pulling the levers and producing this grand illusion of the wizard of oz well who's the wizard well that's probably god and religion but toto the little dog pulls back the curtain and reveals this little figure behind the curtain well that's you could say marx's superstructure and substructure the idea is break through the protective shell get to the core and then get the revolution going now how by stirring up an antagonism between oppressor and oppressed so at the heart of the marxist theory and it would take us all day to go into the details of that but at the heart of it is an oppressor oppressed relationship the capitalist oppressing the worker and thereby deriving profit the marxist revolutionary has to cut through all the superstructure and then foment the class struggle that will lead to the revolution now i'm sure a lot of that is fairly familiar to you and at the end of the talk i'll try to pull out some implications for the present day conversation but i think you can begin to hear overtones in the way people are speaking and acting today now the second person i want to look at is friedrich nietzsche i've become convinced that this 19th century philosopher is at least as influential on our time as karl marx nietzsche like many other modern thinkers and this in itself is kind of an interesting theme was the son of the parsonage so nietzsche's father was a lutheran pastor nietzsche is born near leipzig in 1844 very early on he abandoned the christian faith he would have inherited from his father and he became a student of classical philology so the study of language became his preoccupation now this is very interesting because you'll see now the next person i'll look at john paul sartre who was deeply indebted to nietzsche fascinated with the power of language in fact his autobiography is called lemo in french the words and then michel foucault also deeply influenced by nietzsche language is a central preoccupation of his notice today and i'll come back to this how important language is and the proper protocols and policing of language i'll come back to that so nietzsche does hold a university position for a time in fact he's one of the youngest professors in the german system but his his rather strange personality and bad health compromised his academic career he did most of his writing in the 1880s so when he was in his 40s 1889 he endures a kind of collapse both physical and and mental people speculate what it was psychological illness of syphilis brain issues we don't really know but for the last 10 years of his life he lived basically in seclusion and in a kind of madness he died in the year 1900. now friedrich nietzsche with whom i i'm in radical disagreement but i have to say he was one of the most offeakened and creative thinkers in the western tradition he had an extraordinarily fertile mind he wrote somewhat in the manner of blaise pascal by which i mean he wrote aphoristically kind of short little declarations and short sentences it makes reading him kind of interesting it's not like plowing through a text he does write that way sometimes but often in this epheristic manner again thousands of ideas we could look at in nietzsche i'll just look at a couple that i think are very important for today the first one probably is best known for this is the death of god now here he's like feuerbach and like marks god is dead and we've killed them a famous line he puts in the mouth of one of the characters and thus spake xerathustra maybe his most famous line god is dead and we kill them um what i want to explore though is the implication he draws from this truth so we saw what marx did with the with the non-existence of god what does nietzsche do he draws the conclusion that the foundation for meaning truth and value that it held sway in in the west really from biblical times from ancient times to the present was now giving way now what do i mean here well for most of western thought both theological coming up out of the bible and philosophical coming up out of ancient greece for most of western thought god serves as the foundation for objective truth and objective moral value god is the logos or the supreme reason god is the sumumbonum the ultimate good and in god all the truths and goods that we intuit about the world are finally grounded and find their justification so if there's no god god is dead and we killed him if there's no god then there's no foundation for the claim that there are objective truths and objective moral values all of that gives way as well what are we left with what nietzsche calls perspectivism my perspective on it your perspective on it his perspective her perspective all these millions of perspectives in our language today we might say well it's my truth and you got your truth and she's got her truth over there but there's nothing like the truth to which we are all beholden well there's my set of values from my perspective i see it this way you've got your set of values but there's no such thing as the valuable the good in itself the death of god has led to a radical relativizing of truth and moral value okay what does nietzsche recommend in light of this situation he recommends that we face this world of no objective truth and no objective value with the power of the will i assert my will to power so yes in the face of this of this bleak situation i assert my own will hence nietzsche became a harsh critic of the morality coming up out of the christian tradition now why well our morality puts a stress on pity on compassion on love on forgiveness on non-violence what is that on nietzsche's terms but a slave morality it's a resentful morality those who have who have not effectively asserted their will to power those who've been put down are now kind of urging the the powerful people to you know be nice to us forgive us be have pity for us ah says nietzsche slave morality rather assert your will to power now this does lead to a kind of hobbesian world of clashing wills i mean i got mine you got yours there's no really objective measure by which we can determine which of us is more right or more justified and so you've got a clash of powerful wills leading to again a very influential idea of nietzsche's of the ubermensch in his german superman it's often translated the over man well here's the hero and it's reflected he thinks in some of the best of the greek and roman myths the great heroic figure who stands up and asserts himself yes in the kind of howling winds of this world of no objective truth and value but asserts the primacy of will now i'll come back to this but that issue of the primacy of will over reason i think is visible on the streets of our cities today okay and with that i want to move to this third figure so the first two germans from the 19th century the next two are frenchmen from the 20th century and the first is probably the most famous philosopher of the 20th century probably most of us in at least philosophy 101 would have had some exposure to this figure i'm talking about jean-paul saad now sartre was very influenced by nietzsche nietzsche's impact in the 20th century is enormous think of his influence on someone like martin heidegger and all those that come out of the heideggerian school but his influence on the two i'll look at next sartre and foucault was enormous a bit about jean-paul sartre born in paris in 1905 he studies at the ecole normale superior the superior normal school that was about 10 minutes from the house that i lived in when i was a doctoral student in paris uh it's the cream of the crop of the french intellectual system the education system so the best and brightest figures in the 20th century tended to be what they call normalia normalians right students at the ecole normale so sart studies there he then enters into the french educational system so the graduates typically then would be sent out to li say we call them high schools and then they'd move up through the system so sart did that for a time but then eventually left it behind and becomes by the 1940s and 50s and onward maybe the the paradigmatic public intellectual so he's more than a philosopher sart is also a playwright and a novelist a social commentator a man of the mind but also a man of social action his greatest work undoubtedly is we call it an english being and nothingness being and non-being he was involved famously in the resistance right the resistance to the nazis during world war ii start dies in paris in 1980. now to understand his thought i think there's a really good place to go it's a little book he wrote and appeared in 1946 and it's called existentialism is a humanism existentialism so he's the founder of this famous philosophy existentialism is a humanism it's a little book based on a lecture he gave right after the war so the i think was in late 1945 and it was there in the you know latin quarter and it was at the the height of the of the um kind of cafe philosophers and so on and sart gives this lecture and it becomes the basis for this uh book and it's it's a very pithy and well-written book too not true of all of sart's writings but this one i find very easy to read and the central idea of his existentialist philosophy is clearly articulated here's how he does it by existentialism i mean the view that existence precedes essence the view that existence precedes essence now i know that sounds desperately abstract but it's actually a pretty straightforward idea by essence starts me start means that whole system of ideas and patterns and ideals and forms by which an individual and a society typically would be governed so what does it mean to be human well there's kind of an essential pattern that's been presented you know by philosophers and by theologians and and by the state what does it mean to lead a good life well listen to all these representatives of these essential forms and they'll tell you what that looks like what's the drama of life well to bring existence and by existence he means my individual self especially my freedom to bring existence into line with essence right so you're you're a little kid you're trying to learn to be a responsible adult well all kinds of people will tell you here's what it looks like here's the essential form of being human now bring your freedom your individuality your existence into line with essence so you see on the classical reading essence precedes existence see what i mean precedes it both kind of chronologically and ontologically meaning there's kind of a superiority to essence over existence my life is to kind of accept in a humility of spirit the the objectivity of these essential principles okay sarge says my philosophy is a copernican revolution my philosophy is going to turn that upside down because i say existence precedes essence now you see what he means a plague on your on your essential forms a plague on your idea of what the good life is what comes first is existence that means my individuality especially my freedom and then on the basis of that freedom i determine who i will be i determine the form or pattern of my life you don't tell me how to live no institution no society no church tells me how to live i will decide how to live existence precedes essence existentialism you know in light of that and that starts little book in light of that we can understand more clearly his big book being and nothingness you think okay nothingness is he a nihilist well he's a nietzschean in the sense that he is indeed denying the objectivity of these uh intellectual truths and moral values but see how sartre understands le neil the non-being the nothing not as something oppressive and negative but kind of like a blank canvas there's no objective truth or value so i can invent it i can paint my own beautiful picture according to my lights on the blank canvas of le neon of the nothing just as a nietzsche this this death of god opens up the space into which the will to power can assert itself so now in sartre it opens up the space for existence for my self-assertive freedom to say here's who i am here's what i'm about again i'll come back to this in a little bit but i hope you can see all kinds of overtones for the way an awful lot of people think today in fact i've said for years that what was once whispered in the cafes of paris this idea is now the default position of most young people today don't tell me who i am don't tell me what to believe don't tell me how to behave i decide the assertion of my liberty my existence that precedes essence you know here's a final connection marx was an atheist nietzsche's atheist sard is aggressively atheist now how come well he puts it in a very pithy formula in existentialism is a humanism here it is if god exists i cannot be free but i am free therefore god does not exist that's a pithy little syllogism but you see what it rests upon to some degree the political structure represents essence right it tells you who you should be how you should behave to some degree the family represents essence to us to some degree the culture represents essence to us but what is the ultimate representative the ultimate avatar of essence but god god and again traditionally the ground of objective truth and moral value proposes to us this essential form of life that we ought to conform to therefore if god exists art says i can't really be free god's the ultimate limit to my freedom therefore as i discover the primacy of my freedom of my existence i realize god does not exist god's the ultimate threat to the sartrian program and so uh so he he deeply perceived and that leads me to the final of these four players namely michel foucault this final player is perhaps the least known of the four but he is i would argue perhaps the most directly influential on the present-day conversation and the present-day proxies in some ways foucault represents by the way his name is is spelled f-o-u-c-a-u-l-t michel foucault um in some ways he represents the summing up of the three figures we've already looked at just a bit about him personally he was born in poitiers in 1926 so now we're getting closer to our own time like sartre he was a normalian so he studied at the ecole normale and he was you know at the very height of the french educational system taught for some years in that system afterwards but but he also taught at the university of uppsala in sweden in the 60s during the 60s and 70s michel foucault produced a series of books that were a sensations in france even though they were extremely complicated some became bestsellers and then they became very well known around the western world his famous studies i'll get into some of this of sexuality of madness and incarceration we're very widely read he died young he was only 57 when he died in 1984. i can tell you i came to france in 1989 to begin my doctoral studies and you know in paris i used to say that every block has got a restaurant and a bookstore they want to feed your body and they want to feed your mind well looking out of of the window of practically every bookstore that i would go to in the late 80s was the owlish visage of michel foucault he had this striking face bald head and these little glasses and and sort of intense expression so he was very much of a of a player in those years that i was in paris his writing is dense his thought is notoriously complicated but i think it's fair to say the main lines of his philosophy can be articulated fairly simply in the books that i just described he engages in what he himself called an archaeology of knowledge and that's a it's a very interesting way to look at it so think of a archaeological dig so you begin on the surface right what's what's there today as you dig down in the same location you're going to come to an earlier version of that place and then you dig down more to an even earlier version of that city and then you dig down you dig down and you go through various layers in the same spot but yet different uh incarnations if you want of that same place so that's a master metaphor for the kind of work he does now here's the way it typically works in foucault take something like um sexuality so you begin on the surface and say well what does our society today say about sexual behavior what's acceptable what's unacceptable what's okay what's not etc well then dig down below that to earlier expressions of what we thought was right wrong acceptable unacceptable then dig down deeper dig down deeper go all the way down to ancient times and what you'll find michel foucault typically would say is an extraordinary variety what we say now is is good and right and appropriate sexually well wasn't true let's say in ancient times and you know he shows that in great detail that go back to ancient rome ancient greece their sexual mores were certainly not the same as ours now the same with something like incarceration he was fascinated by that why do we punish certain people what what crimes are punishable and why do we let's say punish with capital punishment certain things and why do we incarcerate for certain periods of time well the same thing obtained he thought start today and the way we think about those issues but then keep digging go back in time go back to the 19th century go back to the 17th century go back to the middle ages go back to ancient times you're digging in the same place so to speak you're digging on this issue of incarceration but you're coming to all kinds of different ways of understanding it issue after issue that's what he typically does now two observations first it's to some degree in service of the nichian idea and foucault is very influenced by nietzsche that there really is nothing like objectively true and good states of affairs so clearly this is the right way to think about sexuality or the right way to think about incarceration because he says look we thought about them differently all throughout our history so it is in service of a kind of nietzschean relativism or perspectivism okay but here's the second thing foucault isn't satisfied with that he asks the follow-up question well how do you account for these differences how come one society thinks about it this way the next society another way and our society the third way how do you explain that here's his basic answer now repeated over and over again in his writings has become a master idea on the scene today and this again is very nichey and an inspiration finally foucault argues it's a function of power those who are in power will arrange things states of affairs and even more importantly they will organize language in such a way as to keep themselves in power now i say language his uh preferred phrase is modes of discourse in other words there's a way of talking about things whether it's sexuality it's uh who's insane and who's not who should be incarcerated who shouldn't be any other issue there's a way of talking about those issues that aren't reflective of some objective state of affairs some objectively right or wrong but are rather functions of the drive to power one class of people that finds itself in power will do all they can to maintain themselves in power they will indeed manipulate circumstances but more importantly they will manipulate language so as to maintain themselves in power so again this is michel foucault's way of thinking about it heterosexuals will tend to demonize homosexuals condemn homosexuality now why because well clearly one's right one's wrong no he would say in order to maintain their own societal dominance males will characterize females as misbegotten or incomplete versions of males and that's true up and down you know much of the tradition so that they the males might remain in charge whites stigmatize blacks first as slaves and then maybe less dramatically as social inferiors in order to maintain white supremacy i wonder if that sounds at all familiar to you most of this foucault thinks is done unconsciously rather than consciously and i was just sort of suggesting the way it happens consciously that people will arrange things a certain way they will consciously change language but it's fair to say he thinks most of it's done unconsciously just the way that you know i'll inherit a language long before i begin to speak it in any distinctive or creative way right i'm speaking english now but i inherited english with all of its rules and all of its presuppositions so in a similar way foucault thought people in a given society will inherit modes of discourse ways of talking about things so what's a large part of the program for him and again this is rather nichian a large part of the program is to see the play between oppressor and oppressed to uncover these dynamics and to see how the modes of discourse we use are enforcing or propagating these forms of oppression you know you might say it's um nietzsche's will to power but with a greater stress placed on the on the injustice of the power relationship so for nietzsche you just got clashing wills to power foucault and it's i think it's a bit of a contradiction in his system because he sees you know this kind of oppression is bad well you just told me there really is no objective moral value isn't that an objective moral value but that's for another day but he does want to unmask these forms of oppression and to see the ways that language contributes to all of it okay so we looked at marx we looked at nature looked at sartre looked at foucault can i suggest now by way of conclusion how all these figures are indeed influencing the present conversation and some of the present activity that we see you know maybe first this observation as a student and teacher of philosophy for many years i've always resented the claim that um well you know philosophy that's all these abstract ideas has nothing to do with the real world come on if there's one thing that history has proven is that ideas have consequences it might take time but the ideas i've been uh rehearsing here this sort of ferrago of ideas from these four figures have definitely found their way into the academies of the west and through those academies have indeed influenced now several generations of people i think what we see on the scene in many ways today are these ideas incarnating themselves so don't don't pooh-pooh philosophy i mean philosophy might take time but it does have a practical consequence so let's go back now to each one of them and just very briefly pull out some of these implications from karl marx what do we see i think we see perhaps above all an antagonistic social theory a social theory of antagonism for marx the only way profit can be derived is through some kind of oppression the capitalist oppressing the worker the revolution is all about calling attention to this oppressive relationship and leading finally a violent revolution of the oppressed against their oppressor the role of the marxist intellectual is to break through the superstructure is to reveal these dynamics and to foster revolution violence for a marxist is not a regrettable side effect in a way violence is the point right you want to foment the class struggle you want to foment these antagonisms the second major theme is the one i was dwelling on a bit that substructure superstructure so important marx has been called it was paul recur the philosopher that came up with this term he's been called a master of suspicion ricker thought freud was a master of suspicion too so was nietzsche the idea is that yeah i know things look this way but what's really going on is something more fundamental and usually more nefarious so i know things look kind of nice on the surface the arts and politics and religion and so on but what's really going on is this kind of grubby substructure i'd submit to everybody that you can hear this rhetoric and see the proxies that flows from it today we need to smash through elements of the superstructure to get at the kind of grubby substructure how about now from friedrich nietzsche well i would say this we find clearly today at least in the minds of some the rejection of god and the related calling into question of the objectivity of truth and moral value once these have been cleared out indeed what's left is a play of powerful forces a clash of wills have you noticed this and you know i do a lot of work on the internet where i try to engage in argument appealing to something like a common set of of norms and values gosh how difficult it is in the social media world to get a real argument going well why because people have denied the objectivity of truth and value so what's there to argue about all that's left is a play of of wills a clash of powerful willows you know how about this everybody i i uh watch the movies because the movies are such a indicator of where popular culture is going and one thing i found is in almost every movie the climax is the hero or heroine finding his own voice finding her voice and her will there's never a question of well is it the right voice is it a good expression of the will is it corresponding to some objective value no no it's i found who i am i'm standing well see that's the nietzschean space if you want there is no objective truth or value but there is the heroic assertion of the will that's the nietzschean program if you want how about from jean-paul south well what i've often termed the culture of self-invention that's an entirely sartrian idea and the culture of self-invention is rampant today as i suggest it's the default position i think of most younger people if essence has disappeared remember sorry existence precedes essence existence comes first my freedom my will and then i determine who i am well if essence is even asked then everything from sexuality gender human nature moral systems are finally just social constructs they're the inventions of people's uh wills so they can be overturned by the heroic self-assertive freedom you know again speaking of movies watch the movie won the academy award for best picture in 2018 called the shape of water i don't know if you saw that movie it's not very good but when i i finished seeing it i turned to the person next to me and said trust me it's going to win the academy award for best picture i just knew it because it checked every box of this system remember the story is about this woman this kind of mousey woman not very confident and then she finds her voice and finds her freedom and she falls in love romantically with a fish man i'm not making this up that's the movie right but here's what's interesting about that the shape of water well what shape does water have it doesn't have any shape water is just fluid it's it's infinitely malleable it has whatever shape you want to give it right you want to put it in a bowl you're going to put it in a glass water is malleable there's there's nothing substantial about it it has the shape that you give it that's jean-paul's art that's existentialism my freedom comes first everything else follows do you remember there was a there was a uh interviewer that went to a university campus some years ago and um was interviewing people and the guy was a young man like you know six feet tall maybe 30 years old and he was asking people on campus uh now if if i said that i'm a woman would you be okay with that and they oh yeah sure you know as long as that's what you claim to be and then he said um now what if i said i'm a i'm an asian woman would you agree with that i said well yeah if that's the identity that you claim sure then the last question which did give them some pause i must say he said what if i claim that i was a six foot five asian woman and they hesitated a little bit but at the end of the day most of them said yeah if that's what you claim to be that's who you are well you know what that is everybody that's the shape of water that's sartrian existentialism run amok if existence precedes essence my freedom comes first i determine who i am well why not why not a 30 year old uh six foot tall of caucasian man can be whatever he wants that's the victory of existence over essence that's on the scene today finally from michel foucault who as i said i think sums up the three previous figures i think this uh viewpoint today gets its deep preoccupation with language and the policing thereof you know in a way foucault combines the antagonistic social theory of marx with nietzsche's great stress on power so they say he sees that the the play of wills is the play of oppressor and oppressed with the oppressor using language as a prime weapon and so can you see this extraordinary interest today in the way we talk and how groups perceive to be powerful use language to keep other people at bay or under control all the talk about microaggressions and triggers and disguised sexism racism homophobia transphobia most of it carried by language that's all right out of the michel foucault uh playbook okay i'm gonna bring the talk to a close uh you have to invite me back to give a full sort of ecclesial response to all this but let me just say a couple things as i bring it to a close i hope it's clear that as i lay out these four thinkers and mind you every one of them has very interesting and and fascinating things to say i'm not in a one-sided way just trying to dismiss all these thinkers but i hope it's clear that generally speaking the church stands a thwart almost all of this how come first of all because we speak of god what's one thing that all four of these thinkers marx nietzsche sartre foucault have in common the denial of god and i think you see why if god exists as the supreme truth and value then there's an objective ground for these things key to all four of these systems is a kind of dismantling of the objectivity of truth and value therefore the institution that speaks most clearly of god is going to stand to thwart this point of view and then by extension that speaks of objective truth and moral value that's going to be problematic next marx and and foucault as well sartre ii in his own way have an antagonistic social theory there's a kind of essential struggle involved in the social order the whole point of the marxist revolution is to is to foment this class struggle the church proposes in its social teaching a cooperative social theory not an antagonistic one doesn't see violence as the means to affecting social change but rather cooperation maybe most profoundly the church as jean-paul sartre correctly saw is the supreme representative of essence of the precedence if you want of essence over existence the drama of the adventure is not you know finding my freedom and asserting it no no the drama the the glory the the the fun of life is bringing my freedom onto line with these great and beautiful and compelling intellectual and moral values that stand outside of me that that draw me to themselves see i i've always found sartre and existentialism with its roots in these earlier thinkers it's finally a deeply dull system because you take away the the compelling power of these great objective values all i'm left with is the boring little space of my self-assertive ego ho hum this little tiny world that i'm living in no no i'm much more interested to use von balthazar's language in the theo drama not the boring little ego drama that i'm in charge of and it's my ideas and my goals who cares but the theo drama where where this world of objective value is drawing me to itself and then behind that realm of objective value is the supreme truth and value of god that's not oppressive to my freedom that it awakens and invites and and lifts me up in my freedom see sergeant knew that everybody he knew the church stood athwart the system we still do can you see now i'll close with this why so many of the forces influenced by these thinkers don't like us it's not just because they've got some little cultural hang up no no they know they know that catholicism above all stands a thwart these philosophical assumptions so it's good for us to know i think where a lot of this ideation today comes from to step back and look at these philosophical sources but also to claim our own great tradition as the best way to stand against it and god bless you

Channel: Bishop Robert Barron

Views: 982,086

Keywords: philosophy, bishop barron, ideas that shape a nation, ideas that shaped the modern world, philosophers who shaped the world, philosophers, modern culture, bishop robert barron, influential philosophers, karl marx, sarte, michel foucault, nietzsche, who shaped the culture, marxism, ideas that shaped the culture, modern culture vs traditional culture, dangerous philosophers, who shaped 2020, Jean-Paul Sartre, shaping the world, ideas that shape the world, ideas have consequences

Id: 8KQcm0Mi5To

Length: 50min 30sec (3030 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 18 2020