Hello, everyone.
I'm Stephen West.
This is philosophized this.
So the end of last episode, I asked about the possibility
of doing an interview with Slava Gieck in the coming weeks.
And the response was overwhelmingly positive,
but there were some people expressing their concerns.
Like, don't change the format of the show, Stephen West.
Don't turn this into an interview show.
And sorry, I wasn't more clear about it last time.
We're doing a series of the show on Gieck right now,
and then several other big thinkers
doing their work today.
And that's the direction we're moving in.
And I really just wanted to know
if anyone was interested in a conversation
totally additional to the podcast
that I'd put out there for anybody one to hear it.
I mean, do you guys think I want to make this
into an interview show?
Do you think I want to turn what we're doing here
and to just, you know, background noise
that people put on whenever they're doing
actually important stuff?
Please, I love this show.
I love how much we can pack in the 30 minutes.
Just feel the need to reiterate,
I just want to keep doing the stuff
you find people enjoy.
That's what I'm going for.
That said, in retrospect, I probably should have waited
to ask if anyone wanted to hear about Gieck
until after I did this first episode of the series.
Reason being is with every one of these podcasts,
there's always a different challenge that comes up,
specific to the episode that needs to be solved.
And the one that came up for Gieck was,
how do you make someone that's as complex as Gieck
can be sometimes accessible to people
who may not even know who he is
or what he's even talking about?
But do that in a way where it also doesn't make it
too boring for people that are already fans of his work.
So just keep in mind, that's what I'm trying to do
in this episode as dumb as that may be.
I can never cover all of Gieck in a day.
And because I'm writing this,
and I'm trying to be respectful to both those audiences,
I guess it just needs to be said at the start
that if you've never heard of the philosopher Slava Gieck
before, first of all, he's a Slovenian philosopher
alive today, doing his work right now.
And I guess the most accurate way to describe what some people
think about him as a philosopher is that people are often
confused about what it is he's trying to say when he says it.
For a number of different reasons, in fact,
if you're new to him as a thinker,
you probably should take a listen to him first,
you can get a frame of reference here.
Good news is there's tons of them out there,
just go to wherever you watch videos, type in ZIZEK.
And I guess sit down and hold on to the sides of your chair,
really, really tight.
This is a man who at first glance has a very bizarre method
of delivering what it is he's trying to say,
but it's intentionally bizarre,
which we'll get to by the end of this.
Is a man that's famous for saying lines like Gandhi
was more violent than Hitler, or that Joseph Stalin
was a very honest man, actually,
or that high digger was not a great philosopher
in spite of his time as a Nazi.
He was great because he was a Nazi.
These are real things that he said.
Now any intelligent person who hears this stuff
has to assume, well, this is obviously an act.
This is a schick.
He's just saying this stuff to provoke people
and get a reaction out of them.
And it's tempting at this point to just write off Gieck
as some sort of philosophical troll,
not really saying anything of value.
But if a troll online is just someone saying stuff
so they can make people offended
and then get a reaction out of them,
then the word troll doesn't even come close
to describing what Gieck is doing.
Because part of the reason he uses
this provocative style of communication
is to purposefully disorient people,
shake them out of a dogmatic slumber
they've been living in for their entire life,
where they've internalized ideology
and typical ways of thinking to the point
where they're not even totally aware
of the ideological game that they're participating in
every day of their life.
Gieck once said that a worry of his,
when it comes to his work,
is not that he's gonna be ignored by the masses,
but that he's gonna be accepted by the masses.
Why would a philosopher be worrying about something like that?
To try to understand it,
we gotta try to see things from Gieck's perspective
as much as we can, which is what I'm here to try to do.
And zooming out as much as I can, I think,
is the best place to start trying to do that.
Because while Gieck, no doubt,
has a bunch of different takes on specific modern issues
that'll certainly get you thinking about them
in a different way than you ever have before,
and we'll talk about those.
There's a sense in which, before we ever even get there,
we first gotta know where he's coming from
with the method or the form of his philosophy.
By the end of this episode, we'll understand why it may be
useful to look at Slav Gieck as more of a work of art
than just simply as a philosopher.
So one thing you gotta know about Slav Gieck
is that among other things,
he is nothing short of incredible
when it comes to his knowledge of philosophical theory.
And he's even more impressive when you consider
how wide a range of thinkers he's able to reference
and bring in to modern discussions
to reinterpret culture like he does.
The 101 version of this,
if you're discerching for basic facts on Gieck,
is that there are three main thinkers
that are near and dear to his heart.
There's Hagel, who we've talked about on this podcast.
There's Marx, who's useful
when critiquing late-stage global capitalism.
And then there's the famous French psychoanalyst
named Jacques Lacan.
That from here on out, I'm just gonna call Lacan
because I'm not French.
And I'm really trying my hardest here
to not sound like a pretentious douchebag
for the rest of the episode, saying Lacan.
Now again, Gieck interprets the world
through far more than just these three thinkers,
but there is some truth to them
being particularly important to him.
And there's a million different starting points
we could pick here for talking about his work,
but I just wanna pick one, get us started,
and ask a very general philosophical question
where we can compare a typical way of viewing it
to the way Gieck sees it.
Here's the question, what is it like to be someone
who's having conversations with other people
about how to make the world a better place?
As a person that's participating in that,
what is your experience of that been like your entire life?
Now I realized that this is a weird question
because I'm not asking what is it to make
the world a better place?
Or what tactics do we use to make social
or ethical progress that would make
the world a better place?
But specifically, what is it like to be a human subject
that is participating in that process?
We're talking about human subjectivity here,
which Gieck spends a lot of time on.
Well, there's many answers to this question.
A common answer in the modern Western world could be
that someone thinks, well, I'm born, my life begins,
and I knew almost nothing about the world as a baby.
But then as my life went on,
I learned a lot of stuff about how the world works.
I got an education, I read newspapers,
I watched documentaries, I listened to really smart people
talk about how the world works,
and from all this, I formed my opinions
based on what the truth seems to be to me
and what I think the best path forward is for society.
So to answer the question, when I'm talking to people
in these political discussions,
I'm really just testing my understanding of the truth
up against other people's understanding of the truth.
I'm a truth seeker, really.
That's all that I am.
And in the process of seeking truth,
I've gotten into some pretty heated political debates
over the years, for sure.
I come across people who vote different than me.
I try to point out contradictions
and how they see things, they try to point out contradictions
and how I see things.
And while it's pretty uncomfortable to be in these debates,
may get me riled up sometimes, ultimately,
if the person across the table from me
is a reasonable person who's well educated,
there's a chance the two of us may be able to come
to some sort of a resolution.
There's a chance I might be able to convince this person
to come over to my side on a couple things.
That's how social progress is made.
Well, that's, if they're reasonable, this person might say,
but let's be honest, this person might also say,
most of the people in today's day and age
that I come across in these conversations
are not reasonable people.
Most of the people that vote differently than me these days
are ideologues.
These are not people that are trying to change their mind
about anything.
They're people who have just decided to believe
in an ideology.
They found the truth about the way the world is
and they ain't moving.
They already got the truth from their youth pastor
when they were eight years old
or from their favorite YouTuber podcaster
or from their cultural studies teacher
and their sophomore year of college.
These are people that have supposedly found the gospel
and now they're gonna spend the rest of their life
like a fundamentalist in the public square,
screaming at everyone for being a heretic
for going against the gospel,
how dare you not believe the things my teacher told me.
This person might say, you can start to feel bad for him.
If it wasn't for the fact that ideology itself
is derailing this process of social and ethical progress.
Look, I'm a truth seeker, not an ideologue
and these people quite frankly are a problem for society.
Now, if you take everything I just said there
as one possible way to view what you're doing
when you participate in the political process,
Slavogye is actually gonna disagree.
He's gonna say that what this person lacks
when they see themselves as a truth seeker
is a deeper level of awareness about the game
that they're actually participating in every day
when they have these political discussions.
He'd probably start with the oversimplified way
that the word ideology is being used here.
He'd say that it is not the case that you are someone
who's really searching for the truth
and that ideology is just something reserved
for people that have given up on the search for truth.
No matter how good your intentions are,
no matter how much you don't follow some codified doctrine,
no matter if you're agnostic, you say,
oh, I'll seek the truth from my whole entire life
and I'll never actually arrive there.
Doesn't matter, Tejizek, you are always making sense
of the world through the lens of an ideology
or more accurately, a bunch of different ideologies
stacked on top of each other that have huge effects
on your thoughts, values, desires
and what you end up doing in the world.
The question to Jizek is not do you have an ideology
but how self-aware are you of the ideological structures
that dictate your thinking?
And then from that place of self-awareness,
how self-determining can your actions become?
Let's slow down for a second though.
Let's rewrite the story from before
about what it is to participate in a political discussion.
Jizek would agree with at least the first part of the story.
We are born into the world as babies
and don't really know anything about it.
But then Jizek's gonna ask the question
inspired by the psychoanalysis of Joclecon.
How does that baby form all these complicated things
that it brings into those political discussions
later on in life, like its sense of identity?
Its views about how the world works,
how it fits into social systems.
How does that baby in other words acquire its subjectivity?
Well, mostly Jizek thinks
from what LeCon called the symbolic order.
Sounds super fancy, just stay with me.
A question and conversations about human subjectivity
is how can this baby from our example
ever hope to understand the full chaotic complexity
of base reality?
How can it just be born into the world
and then understand all that on its own?
Well, it can't.
So what does the baby do?
It learns to make sense of its reality
through the mediation of symbols of all different types
that simplify reality, the symbolic order.
For example, language is a collection of symbols.
As we know, a word is a type of symbol
that makes reference to something in reality.
But as we also know, words are limited
and can never truly capture the full extent
of what something is.
Words are not reality.
But to most of us, it doesn't really matter that much.
Words do a good enough job to communicate most of the time, right?
Well, as these words are combined and then systematized,
they then give rise to other types of symbols
we use to make sense of things, things like rituals,
traditions, social norms.
These are undeniably things that help people
organize the endless possibilities in life.
But we also recognize that at another level,
there's nothing objective about these things.
Combine and systematize those symbols
and eventually eland at symbols that are even more complex.
How about political stances like conservative or progressive?
How about social or economic policies?
How about postmodernism or classical liberalism
or pragmatism or multiculturalism?
None of these are harnessing the full truth about reality.
How could they be?
They're just elaborate collections of symbols
that people come up with to try to describe certain aspects
of reality in an incomplete way.
And when these symbolic ways of simplifying reality
get you...
