Robert Nozick Interview 1990

[Music] it is only through a change in human consciousness that the world will be transformed the personal and the planetary are connected as we expand our awareness of mind body psyche and spirit and bring that awareness actively into the world so also will the world be changed this is our quest as we explore new dimensions [Music] [Music] in a culture that glorifies fast cars fast food eternal youth and rampant materialism it is not surprising that many of us give little thought to what life is really about mostly we tend to go along an automatic pilot adhering to old patterns and long-held beliefs without very much reflection on our actions today we want to explore the possibilities of the introspective life looking within and without reflecting upon our values assessing our relationships seeing the brevity and preciousness of life and so much more our guest is Robert Nozick author of the examined life philosophical meditations Robert Nozick is the author Kingsley Porter professor of philosophy at Harvard University his book Anarchy state and utopia caused controversy and discussion with its comments on the welfare state it went on to win the 1975 National Book Award his second book philosophical explanations won the Ralph Waldo Emerson award Phi Beta Kappa in 1982 he is the recipient of fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation and National Endowment for the Humanities and is a member of the Council of scholars of the Library of Congress join us for the next hour as we explore the meaning of life with our guest Robert Nozick my name is Michael Tom's I'll be your host welcome to new dimensions Robert welcome thank you yes it's nice to be here so when did you first become interested in philosophy under that first occur for you well it seems to me it actually occurred in high school though I didn't have any very firm idea of what philosophy was about but I was an avid reader and wandered through libraries and came across some philosophy books and came across Plato's Republic actually and read it or read the first part of it and was very excited by it and thought these were wonderful ideas and bold new thoughts that I hadn't had before it seemed like a wonderful activity and one that I wanted to learn more about and and become part of in some way so there was only at university that I then started to really study it in New York City and learn more about it so how old were you when he came across Plato's Republic well fifteen or sixteen I think and and I was also perhaps a little bit show-off he is a kid in the way young people walk around with books showing other people that they're reading books I mean Plato's Republic for a while might have been my emblem as a as a young person but it was an inspiring vision of things and of how the mind could work and be concerned about important things so why particularly did Plato's Republic intrigue you well you see particularly it's not quite that I had read all the other philosophy books are decided Plato's Republic was the one it was the one I the book I stumbled upon as a kid early in the paperback revolution in the 1950s but there was there was talking it of it combined the rational and the quest in life in in an interesting and intricate way so that rational were rational arguments and trying to work out a theory of things and yet Plato as is well known had this theory of forms and higher things and a deeper reality that we were trying to relate to so in some way it was combining the rational mind with a spiritual quest of some sort or if not spiritual at least the quest for higher things were you a member of a religious group at that time or when you're being raised in particular no well I I am Jewish and it was a Jewish family but I was not at that point in any way attached to it and so so it was really perhaps an alternative mode of intellectual and spiritual development rather than one that I thought was going to enrich what I was already doing I mean like many young people I was sort of somewhat competitive about religion at the time and and skeptical and questioning look father started your mythic trail and you that led you to college and a major in philosophy that's right that's right yeah and to graduate school afterwards and it's though the intellectual work I've done has has been different with each book and each time still when I look at the career pattern of undergraduate graduate student faculty member and and so on it's been rather a straight line perhaps it orders exact more and I other didn't worry about that but it's been been in in career in occupational terms relatively straight line one of the things that struck me about the exam in life is that you begin with a chapter on dying why did you do that well we may not know fully why we do everything but it seemed as though dying was was a question that raises forcefully to people issues about the meaning of life and the purpose of life it emphasizes its finer two'd and it was also a time when my father was undergoing a long illness and it was something that I was thinking a lot about at the time and I since the book was published in the summer of 1990 he he died and so it was something that was much on my mind at the time and I wanted to it was perhaps a way of emphasizing that this book was going to be more personally written than the other philosophy books that I'd written so I was going to start out with a subject that directly concerned me and was moving me and and that had a lot of emotion attached to it as well as intellectual curiosity you made a point that we can't really confront death until our parents are dead perhaps you could elaborate on that well it seemed maybe that sometimes it's said that people really never take seriously the possibility of their own death and that didn't seem right it seems that some people really do and cope with it in in interesting ways but that while one's parents were alive there was the sense that it wasn't your turn yet that somebody else still had to go first not that you were looking forward in any way to their deaths but but it's as though there was a sequence of generations and until they were dead you weren't next in line but you were some distance away from the prospect and so I thought that it was only when you were next in line that you could face it most truly and forcefully and now what that means is actually at the time that I was writing the book my father was still alive so maybe it was also my way of saying that the reader should take that into account and that I might be having different thoughts afterwards when I was confronting death or the prospect of it in a more immediate way myself or at least the prospect of my own death so what happened after he died and did your did your few change well it's been relatively recent and I must say that I haven't really spent any time thinking about my own death since then but of course I've thought about him and and the nature of his life so so perhaps it's too soon to say whether I'll have what different thoughts I'd have about that topic somehow on the death of our parents that the parent in some ways becomes a teacher for us to remind us what we're about to go through at some point in the future and did you find that your father was your teacher in that way well he was certainly very encouraging about the different things I was doing but I it may be that we expect that we'll follow the path of our parents in some way not not necessarily the way they've lived or this of the or what their goals are but but I found perhaps unrealistically that and I found that other friends think this as well that you sort of expect the lifespan of your parents and you worry about encountering some of the same physical difficulties and ailments that they did and so on so in that sense provide a certain kind of framework within which you think your life will go on and and within which you have to live but but a teacher I I don't think I can really say that but we may not be very aware well of all of the things that really do teach us in the world as we pass the night and then you when you left the essay on dying you went into the relationship appearance and children yes and so that was an interesting combination there to weld you were obviously kind of connecting the two in some way well yes but it's but it's also true that that at the same time that one thinks about parents dying those of us who have children think about continuity of generations and what it means to have a next generation and what the situation will be when we die and and and comforting one's parents as that dying brings up thoughts of of what will happen when you're in your parents situation and the children will be comforting you and it comes to two-seam in a way or it did to me at the time that that it was the comforting relation that was important in the relationship to death it wasn't really so very important which position you were in at the time you might at one point be the comforter at another time the comforted and what was important too was to relate very strongly over this very significant life issue you'll often also wrote about the the tendency on the part of many people to amass wealth and to bequest that and and the the level of control that that incorporates even after the person dies that you can control your children with the way you handle your will what about that well yes I hadn't myself then captured anything like that and and so on but it did seem as I was thinking about the way people want to express their relationship to children that often the institution is set up so that parents are very controlling and of their children and try and bring about certain kinds of subservience during during the time that they're alive but it's in a certain way thinking about material goods played a motivating force in this book in the following way that is as when I entered the academic world there were not large material rewards that were in prospect and and I pursued intellectual thought and figuring out philosophical problems some of them with personal relevance and others just out of intellectual curiosity and grew older and was in a position where I could rethink the value of material goods by rethink the value of it I mean like many people who choose to pursue some intellectual course of life I really denigrated material goods they weren't really important the most important things were other things and so later on I came to think well what is it that I denigrated the importance of that perhaps because I didn't see a very clear way to acquire it in large quantities and so on and now that I was older and I wanted to rethink the value of those things perhaps they were more valuable than I thought I didn't really think so but I wanted to rethink it perhaps predictably I ended up saying no they're not really more valuable than I thought it still is a trivial and superficial life that pursues material goods and makes that central to one's quest and I I wanted to understand why in various kinds of ways but I I thought it was important to freshly reconsider some of the the goals and principles and standards that I taken for granted ever since I was a young man at the age of 19 or 20 and and set out on a direction in life and it seemed to me that that every so often I don't say very frequently one should you mentioned automatic pilot one should reconsider those kinds of of goals - in fresh life circumstances to make sure that you're still pursuing what freshly considered you would take to be most important the then you kind of went away from the material and suggested the possibility of how we might bequeath our knowledge our life experience to our children maybe you could expand on that I suppose it was not only to our children but to other people I thought that one of the things we really wanted to to convey to our children into others was a sense of what we held most precious and most valuable and though wealthy people were intent on leaving material possessions there were other things that we could leave to our children an example a sense of curiosity liveliness enthusiasm in addition to loving them and so on and and perhaps also in writing a book like the examined life not to not to make it there's a sense that when one one is one hopes personally helpful to other people in life and you teach and that's very valuable and you awaken people to ideas but important I'd like to think that as I was writing I was trying to do something that might be valuable in other people's lives and what can one convey to them then but thoughts and an attitude towards life and what it is so it's not just to one's children but but I suppose a way of saying that in in one's books and in this book in particular there was an attempt to give something to people now that doesn't mean that I was setting out a view of life that I thought that they all ought to follow so perhaps what I was giving was not only some sense that I had of how to live life but but a sense of how to think about it and that reflective way was something that I think I wanted people to do at least for a while as they read this book even if they ended up going along a different path well in some ways it's not the answers it's the questions we ask and the questions we ask and how we approach those questions I mean those don't determine answers but there was I it's not just the questions you wouldn't want to spin a roulette wheel and then if the ball lands on number you know twenty-eight say okay that means this answer and I'll follow it so I mean of course I'm not telling you anything special and so it's it's deepening the questions and also showing a way to responsibly think about the questions but also of being open to to new and perhaps unorthodox answers to some of these questions speaking with Robert Nozick author of the examine life professor of history at Harvard University we'll be right back philosophy philosophy has excuse me that's right that's all right great maybe I should be a professor [Music] [Music] Robert are we all creative we all have creative capacity well if creative means the way Michelangelo and Leonardo and Tolstoy and Einstein were created then then we're all not that creative actually I mean perhaps it would be nice to think that we all did have the capacity and it just hasn't been fully developed but I don't know that that's true it's an optimistic story but I think we all do have the capacity if not to be creative in those ways to to mold our lives in new directions so that we break established rigid patterns so that we notice them so that we think of no alternatives in our personal relations in what we're doing and the way we encounter other people so we don't stay compressed in the in the boxes and the rigid frameworks that people often take for granted and don't see any way around so in that sense I think we want to be creative and we have the capacity to be and we ought to be alert opportunities for being creative yes there was a an essay in the book the holiness of everyday life yes and I was struck by that it's it's almost an Eastern concept well it did arise in part I think I did pay attention to it because of Easterns like issues about meditation or not issues but but an interest in Eastern meditative practices there is some strand in Western thought also that will talk about the holiness of everyday life the American transcendentalists talked about seeing the universe and a flower and so on the Jewish tradition has has Commandments that are meant to sanctify and bring out the holy part of of everyday life but but in my case it really was an interest in Eastern meditative practice that that leads one to notice everyday activities in a very different way they activities like either eating and breathing and just noticing ordinary objects they tend to have a unsuspected dimensions and a great richness and almost revelatory power about them and and it may sound in some context too precious to talk about it that way but it does what I meant by the holiness of everyday life was that the world was unsuspectingly rich in this way and if one approached it with the right attitude it's not an accident that this book the examined life was subtitled philosophical meditations it was not just that I wanted to draw on the philosophical notion of Descartes wrote meditations and thinking about things reflectively but I wanted in some way to have Eastern meditation also be a part of what was happening in this book and Buddhist meditation in particular and so so yes the holiness of everyday life is something that one can come to freshly noticed through meditative practice yeah is reminded of a book by Carl Friedman Durkheim who's a psychoanalyst in Germany who spent much time in Japan enamored of Zen Buddhism and that he wrote a book called spiritual life is everyday practice yes and again it was that emphasis on the everydayness of life and the aspects of everyday life being a vehicle and a catalyst for personal transformation yes and Zen is and the Buddhist tradition in general but Zen in particular really does emphasize everydayness and the ordinariness of what one is noticing but then one is noticing it in a fresh way it's not everyday inattention that they're concerned about they're concerned about paying very sharp attention to things in a way so that the self and yourself doesn't get in the way of things the way things are see in fact the it it seems to me that the Zen koans are sometimes misunderstood and misinterpreted if I might say something about that the see some people view very spiritual traditions as a way of taking one away from this world and to another realm and so on and that is very interesting but it seems to me the Buddhist tradition really should be viewed as as getting us to pay a particular kind of attention to this world and to see it freshly and the Cohens are sometimes thought of as questions that have no rational answers and they make see the limits of rational thought but it's unclear why if these questions what is the sound of one hand clapping it's a what was why they should why if they're really meaningless questions why any more than any other meaningless question if somebody asked you Ishkabibble menthe something and made up some meaningless sequence of sounds with a questioning intonation it would not get you to see the limitations of rational thought so how is it that in meditating on the Coens and thinking about them where we're to come to some new insight and it seems to me that one can understand it in the following way that and this is a known part of Buddhist doctrine that one is meant to come to a new understanding of the nature of the self there is a Buddhist no self doctrine in some way minimally put we can say that the Buddhist tradition is thinking that the the self and a concern with ego concerns and organizing one's being around the kind of entity that a self is gets in the way of the most direct relationship to things it's as though the self is a pair of colored glasses that we wear through which we see everything and so much of Buddhist practices designed to to weaken that self perhaps dissolve it get rid of that conception of the self so that you experience your being differently and hence come to experience the world differently so now back to Zen koans it hypothesis is the following that that that we structure our experience of the world around the self it's like those famous diagrams of psychologists where you can see two faces looking at each other or avaaz or when we as kids would draw a box in three dimensions in lines do you see it you know with this point of facing inward or backward and so on and it flips back and forth and when we look at those diagrams if somebody doesn't see it a certain way and you're trying to say look you can see Avon's rather than two faces we can say look notice this is the corner of the Vaz rather than part of somebody's forehead or notice this corner of the box is the lower right hand front corner rather than this other one and then it it springs into place well similarly our view of the world is organized around the self when the self is part of it it gets contoured and springs into place in a certain way and if you alter the view of the self so the Buddhist tradition is saying I'm saying then you come to see the world completely differently it's not that you're seeing another world but what you see and relate to when you're not filtering it through the self is this different from what you saw before as two faces off from Avaaz it's a completely different Gestalt experience of the world and it may well be then that when you see the world differently in that way the Kohen questions really do have very straightforward answers it's it's hard to see what those answers could be in to make sense of them when we're seeing the world normally organized around the very strong notion of the self and ego but when we see it differently then those cowan questions can be very clear with very clear and straightforward answers and so a test of your seeing the world in that different way is really seeing what those answers are and making sense of it well and also I think some ways in the concept of the self it really has its source in the mind yes and how we perceive who we are who we think we are yes and then and so in I think the practice of Buddhist meditation is really the study of the mind and how the mind works and going and Krishnamurti although you know I sent a Buddhist I he had a lot of similarities but it's used to say we have to beyond the mind to knowing and he was referring of course to the mind bringing that part of the mind that creates those patterns and those automatic pilots as it were that cloak our real ability to see to have that other perspective that you're saying that other perception too to see the vaz instead of the faces or in the faces instead of the vollis yes yes but there is when one does that careful noticing of the way the mind works there's sometimes an assumption and then we notice how reality looks when we pay very careful attention to that how the mind works that we're discovering a true way that it is for example in the Buddhist tradition doing a certain sort of meditative practice the world comes to seem less substantial just as there's a Buddhist doctrine of no self there's a view that physical objects are really impermeable practice come to see objects as as flickering as as not continuous in time and then there's a conclusion that says ah now that we've noticed we've come to notice things more carefully being very careful in our meditative practice we've discovered by observation that the world isn't as substantial as we thought it was and there's an emptiness underneath and that it's a look right but that's also an assumption that that practice is getting you to make more accurate observations and it might be without going into detail there might be other explanations of those observations which don't involve the world being less substantial but you might be really noticing something about how the mind works in representing the world and so this kind of flickering in Buddhist meditative practice which is reported in a lot of literature and by a lot of people might be really an observation of how the mind represents the world rather than of a not very substantial world the mic the world still might be very substantial but we've learned something about how we represent it just as sort of movie frames represent the continuous world in a discontinuous way and we don't normally notice that similarly our mind might represent the world that a continuous substantial world in a discontinuous way and we don't normally notice it in the Buddhist meditation enables us to pay very careful attention and notice that about how our mind works but you shouldn't rush to conclude that the world isn't very substantial I want to continue this around and we're getting into something here it's really interesting I'm speaking with Robert Nozick author of the examined life professor of philosophy at Harvard University we'll be back in one minute [Music] I'm thinking as you were talking about the quantum physics physicist definition of material reality you know just on this table that we're sitting at is a basically a collection of molecules and atoms and protons and neurons and they're all revolving you know in that flickering way that maybe the Buddhist meditators cxeh yes in some ways we see the quantum physicists almost talking in mystical terms so it's it may be that the practice validation does take us into the seen the material reality for what it really is hard but soft and I understand what the physicists are telling us is is extremely interesting here and there have been a number of people interested in spiritual practice of one sort or another who have who have paid careful attention to that I I am slightly skeptical and I might say what I think about that without being as knowledgeable as I would like to be about it and it's part of a general pattern of what I think I think one wants the combined so rational consideration of things with an openness to two new directions and dimensions of things that one might not otherwise observed what what what makes me slightly skeptical is the following that many of the physicists who say this well people who were predisposed already to to want to produce a spiritual interpretation of physical reality that they were independently doing a spiritual practice or a meditative practice and they say look how physics supports the view that we have and it may it may but what I would find more convincing not being an expert myself is I would like to hear some you know hardcore materialist physicist say you know I used to think it was all garbage and I really don't want the world to be this way it's not that I I hope that it turns out to be this way I don't want the world to be this way but nevertheless physics and its results now drive me to conclude that in some way the physical reality is less material and more spiritual in some way and involves consciousness and and all that then I had thought before somebody reluctantly being convinced of that who knows the the physics very well to an outsider like me who doesn't know it very well but who follows some of the discussions of it would be more compelling evidence of the of the conclusion that the the physical theories now are receptive to a spiritual interpretation then somebody who was yearning for a spiritual interpretation who says I'll look it really opens itself to that so I'm not saying that the the physicists of sorts that and perhaps you've spoken to them on your program who come and say look quantum physics now and talk about super positions in quantum states and Bell's Theorem and a lot of technical things really do support and fit in very well with some Eastern view when they themselves love the Eastern view to begin with I'd like somebody who doesn't like the East in view and says Brian gone damn it I really have to pay serious attention to that now because physics forces me to and when that happens then the rest of us who are not experts will know that physics really does show something like yeah well I'm not suggesting that the bridge be made I'm suggesting that there are physicists who are not into Eastern philosophy that are essentially telling us what material reality looks like yes yes and I'm just saying isn't that interesting yes that physics physics this view of material reality is very similar to the Buddhist meditators view over here and just to say isn't that interesting good yes I agree I agree and it certainly is the case that the physicists now whether or not they're receptive to Eastern views or not have a very hard time presenting a coherent view of what reality is like in view of quantum physics it's not just that it's in deterministic but the notion of an independently existing reality and what it might be like apart from our observations is now no longer clear and so and it changes when we observe it that's right that it's it's so independent and in a way sort of comes into being when we observe it I mean going as they say from a superposition into a particular stage so the point I wanted to make was that these views that are being propelled by physicists whether or not they're interested in Eastern philosophy are very interesting when one goes over here to the literature in Eastern philosophy and notices what they're saying right there's interesting parallels yes I quite agree one of the things that occurs to me we're talking about the the holiness of everyday life and and there's this idea and American culture of life liberty and the pursuit of happiness and I think that we're all kind of entrained conditioned with the idea that we're supposed to be happy all the time that and if we're not if we don't have happiness most of the time then something's wrong with our life now you suggest something a little different than that yes it does seem to me that that when people say that about happiness then normally thinking of happiness is some kind of inner experience or emotion or feeling I mean to put it very crudely it's like a feel-good view of things and they think well we should feel good all the time and other people should be sure if bad things happen we want to respond to them in some appropriate ways and that might be to feel bad if there's a tragedy but the desirable state is to feel good always and I'm not saying that's undesirable but the view that that's the be-all and end-all of life is wrong it seems to me for two reasons one it treats us as empty buckets to be filled with good feeling it ignores what we should be like and what and how our nature should be developed it's just we ought to be stuffed full of goodies of good feelings and and good feeling emotions and perhaps a short way of saying that that happiness isn't the only thing that matters and even the most important thing that might be suggestive in this context would be one can imagine a science-fiction situation it's one that I described in this book the examine life and it once described earlier also of of a kind of machine and experience machine that could give us any kind of experiences we want you can you can float in a tank with electrodes attached to your brain we could imagine it's not now the case so far as I know but we can imagine that psychology and neurophysiology develop over the next 50 and 100 years so it will soon be possible to give people any experiences that they might want from the inside by stimulating their neurons and and altering the chemistry of the brain in particular ways they also have the development of virtual reality that's right with that your switch is quite extraordinary that's right that's right and so so we have various technologies that promise that and then then you can ask yourself the question well what I want to spend a life like that would that give me everything I want if all that matters to us or should matter is feeling happy and the kinds of experiences and even emotions we have then and and people might say that they I mean on this view the reason you would want to love someone else is for the feeling of love and the good feeling it gives you rather than actually relating to that other person the reason you would want to to make something happen in the world is for the feeling of accomplishing that well these machines might give us all that now I would not and I assume most people would not choose to plug in to such machines and not just because other people might be unhappy we might imagine those machines were available to them also and not worry about who's supplying it to them so what would be left out of a life that that had any feelings you want from the inside it you could have the feelings of interviewing people on a radio program the machine could give you that of extremely fascinating interviews your listeners might have more interesting experiences that I'm now giving them right now so what would be left out of of something like that well it would be like living a lie we wouldn't actually be doing those things you wouldn't actually write a book you just have the feeling of having written a book but we want actually to do various things we want the world actually to be certainly and we want to connect with actuality and with reality in a certain way she Freud actually formulated a principle he called the reality principle there was the pleasure principle which essentially was saying in some version that all we want is to be happy and the reality principle said well we want to pay attention to reality because reality gets in the way of our being happy and so we pay attention to reality only as a way of maximizing or enhancing the pleasure that we have over a lifetime we pay attention to reality so that we can interact with it in a way so as to get more pleasure and as he said therefore the reality principle is subsidiary to the pleasure principle but I'm saying something different that is that we think that contact with reality has a value in and of itself an intrinsic value not just because it serves getting more pleasure the experience machine can give us more pleasure but we don't want only that in a lifetime we want really to have contact with reality all right so whatever that perception is whatever that is but then that really raises questions if we want contact with reality and that has value then maybe if we think that there are I don't mean to be too evocative that reality has various layers or levels or there's a deeper reality other than the one that we ordinarily think we're encountering then we want contact with that as well and in fact part of our reason for wanting contact with actuality and not just floating in an experience machine might also be a reason for saying that what we want is a contact with the deepest reality there is and we want to be able to to guide our lives to find out what that is and to establish that kind of contact yeah there's the paradox of this pursuit of happiness and pleasure the paradox that exists I think particularly in the West and I'm thinking particularly of my Irish forebears is and I are saying that says it's not okay to have what you want so there's this feeling that when you do have what you want or having pleasure happiness that's something you should feel guilty about it because not everybody has it you know that kind of thing what about that yes well I think we don't want to be self-indulgent then just ignore the fact that other people have it but I wonder is it just the social conscience that your irish forebears had and said don't feel happy when you have what you want boost others don't have it or was it some sense of skill that they were carrying with that I think well it's a religious right of guilt that's allocated through the religion that's right I don't think that we are or that people should think of themselves as being undeserving of happiness I don't think they should focus their lives solely around it but I don't think that people are on deserving and one would want people to be open to being happy in the same way we want them to be open to other aspects of the world and we want them to live in a way that that being happy is a fitting response to not to focus upon happiness as their made you go but to focus on other goals that we think it's proper to feel happy when you achieve and are living that way and then the other aspect is to the the the won't say the antithesis of happiness but the fact that there is there are valleys and peaks in life and we do have our ups and downs we do have our difficult moments and perhaps our easier moments and there's an aspect of really experiencing that that's important there was an essay in the book examined life of darkness and light and the particularly there was a quote that you that I thought was really quite wonderful from Rilke that I'd like to just sort of read some because it really kind of captures what I'm trying to say here and what you're trying to say whoever does not some time or other give his full consent is full and joyous consent to the dreadfulness of life can never take possession of the unutterable abundance and power of our existence can only walk on its edge and one day when the judgment is given will have been neither alive nor dead to show the identity of dreadfulness and bliss these two faces on the same divine head indeed this one single face which just presents itself this way or that according to our distance from it or the state of mind in which we perceive it this is the true significance and purpose of the elegies and the son of store feeis yes I'm glad you read that what's true is I included that quote poorly to make myself uncomfortable because I was aware that I wasn't myself giving my true assent fully to that dark side of things and so for me there's a there's a puzzle one certainly doesn't want to be oblivious to it one wants in the same way I think you don't want to live your life is a lie or live in the experience machine without actuality being that way when there are things happening in the world we want to recognize fully the nature of the world and when there are tragedies and calamities we want to respond fully to them in some deep and serious way but but I myself don't have a view that those calamities and tragedies are on our on a par with the the good it's I suppose it's an optimistic assumption that if we get down to the ground floor of the universe whatever that's like that we will find that that the darkness is not as deeply rooted as the light now well we direct to the Buddhists yes say there's no positive or negative that yes the warp and rule for the universe that's how we perceive it that is the criteria the the the critical factor yes yes I mean I even as I speak in your audience know that notice I'm speaking more hesitantly it's that perhaps this is as the Buddhist would say still my attachment to the world that I wanted in some way to be in a positive light and I am still drawing this distinction between the positive and the negative and so one part of me thinks perhaps it's a more profound view to eliminate that distinction and welcome all aspects of the universe and another part of me still has this evaluative criterion that that aims towards the positive and is not equally welcoming of of everything but I know for your own experience for my own experience we can speak of times in our life that we've been through some kind of suffering and coming out the other side of it somehow life takes on a different quality than before we had the suffering and also having interviewed people who have been through great suffering talked with people who've been through great suffering there's a quality of their appreciation of life that I noticed that may not have been there I would guess I don't know this for certain but may not have been there quite in the same way at the level or the depth that it is now because of the suffering that they went through yes yes the suffering can deepen a person in in all kinds of ways and it can also give them a new appreciation of the positive aspects of life if only because they're aware of the fragility of that situation and very much aware of the contrast between those good positive things and the suffering but it's not or is it that they come to think that the suffering itself is is worthy and ugly that is it's a means and I'm not denying that it can be a means towards an appreciation of other things and towards towards greater depth oneself but yes what I'm trying to focus on is that not to glorify suffering or to say that it's good to suffer but the how we accept or perceive and experience the suffering is what's important and that's where the embrace or the the repulsion of the brace takes place that you know if we embrace with the idea that well I've got to feel this fully and it's like it's feeling someone's else someone else is suffering if we feel the death of our parent the dying of our parent we feel that or do we repress it you know and so often we tend to repress those feelings and we don't really experience it fully and in that sense we rob ourselves of the experience of the richness of life yes yes I agree that and moreover that that in certain ways opening ourselves to that suffering alters the character of the suffering that that in a way by becoming less resistant to it it allows it to pass through us in a way that rigidly bracing ourselves against it and fighting it each instant just shatters us and it prolongs the suffering and alters its character so in a way you want to allow you want to become in a way as empty as possible during that time suffering so that it passes through you and out now that's easy to say and and wants to do but it is also one one model an analogy of that in a more delimited arena is the way certain kinds of pain can be coped with in that it a practice the way even sitting in cross-legged position can be painful over an extended period of time your knees hurt your legs hurt your ankles hurt and so on and this is now just an empirical fact not a wish focusing upon the unpleasant sensations rather than trying to ignore them focusing on the pain with full meditative attention alters the character of those sensations it instead of a massive lump of intractable pain it become it breaks it up it it so it's not just one lump and moreover it's not just pain it may be very intense sensations but all all of them are no long and negatively experienced and so that focus of attention and alters the character of the painting it makes one think that perhaps certain kinds of pain at least that physical pain it doesn't just come guaranteed to be pain it's partly the way we're perceiving it that makes it pain and when we alter the kind of attention we pay to it and the way we perceive it not just grimacing and turning away but looking at it it's character gets altered now I don't say that that would necessarily happen with other suffering in life that one one pays very careful attention to it it would itself not turn out to be as painful that's a complicated question but but certainly certainly that kind of non denial of willingness to face the fact that one is suffering can even if it doesn't shorten it right then and alter it right then can I believe change the way you are afterwards yes you also brought up in lighten meant in the examine life and I think in the West we have you know the age of enlightenment and we have a view of enlightenment that differs from the Enlightenment view of the East perhaps you can talk about that a bit because you kind of focused on the eastern yes definition of enlightenment and I wanted to bring in the western aspect as well ah the West you mean the the 18th century and the French enlightenment so on well that's actually interesting I it's funny that I I should have thought about the the parallels but let me now say that each of these movements was a way of escaping from the rigidities of imposed patterns of thought in in France the home of the Enlightenment Voltaire and Diderot and Montesquieu and others there there was and cont'd also as a figure of the Enlightenment in Germany there were inherited medieval religious patterns and social patterns at that fettered people and kept them in a certain sort of chains Rousseau said man is born in Chains and distracted yeah that's right and and so the Enlightenment was bringing rational forth to bear that Western alignment rational thought to bear to reexamine to notice those chains we examine it and show ways of being Unchained unfettered and similarly the Eastern tradition is noticing other kinds of binding fetters that that a certain relationship to the world and a certain building of the self brings about and they're also proposing the different kinds of techniques to loosen or dissolve those fetters and chains so each of them is a liberabit of movement and it's interesting that that enlightenment doesn't itself mean liberation though in fact liberation is a term in Eastern thought as well at least as it gets translated into into English but each of them are liberated liberation through a certain kind of knowledge and and change of view yes so what do you think Eastern enlightenment offers us in the West well I don't have a simple answer to the question of what our office I think it's something that we have to take very seriously and we want to both I mean it'll it offers us perhaps an alteration of our of our view of what our goals are and of what we ought to be like as people and it offers us also a route towards connection with the deeper reality that we might not normally have any contact with but we want to use our rational minds also to to examine along the way any spiritual practice that's suggested and to see whether it really does deliver the results and and combine both the spiritual side with our rational side Robert I feel there's a great deal more we could cover but we're running out of time I might just say one thing that your book the examine life I think is a good map to the territory of data and life experience that we all have and is in a sense a map to kind of calling out the wisdom in our own lives and it seems to me that what we have a great shortage of in these times is wisdom and a great abundance of information and data so in that way it's a contribution oh well thank you very much and it's been very nice being here yes talking with you my guest has been Robert Nozick professor of philosophy at Harvard University and author of the examined life published in paperback by Simon & Schuster touchstone my name is Michael Tom's on behalf of the new dimensions radio staff and all those who are members of friends of new dimensions I'm wishing you lots of examination in your life this is program number 22 23 Robert Nozick one of the late 20th century's most influential thinkers died in January of 2002 he was 63 new dimensions radio is an independent producer supported by listener contributions since 1973 new dimensions radio has produced programming covering the history of the future for more information and a complimentary copy of the new dimensions newsletter or to order an audio copy of today's program using American Express Visa discover or MasterCard call 1-800 388 eight 273 that's one eight hundred three eight eight tape or visit our website new dimensions org

Channel: Obiter Dicta

Views: 28,636

Keywords: robert nozick, nozick, libertarian, libertarianism, liberty, life, natural rights, taxation, anarchy, state, utopia, happiness, suffering, meaning, politics, political philosophy, philosophy, minimal state, statism, harvard, rawls, huemer, friedman, minarchy, democracy

Id: Ldngi2WtGik

Length: 55min 31sec (3331 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 05 2018