Mike and Darren: Unplugged ep. 5 (with Peter Field)
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- čas přidán 28. 05. 2024
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Dr. Michael Sugrue earned his BA at the University of Chicago and PhD at Columbia University.
‘Conceptually invertebrate.’ A brilliant throwaway line, and not untypical!
He throws away lines that others would cling to.
I loved that!
Darren's thoughts on trauma, human nature, and facing the past (and present) were truly powerful.
Best philosophy channel on CZcams!!!
hands down.
they're always interested in the subject matter, not in being contentious for its own sake which is the case all over CZcams
I'm so grateful for these talks. Thank you three for taking the time.
😂😂😂😂😂😂😂“Listening to Darren I have to take my medicine"😂😂😂😂 😂 Thank you for this conversation, such a pleasure listening to these fine minds.
Some of your lectures on here have blown my mind. Thanks
I like these 3 together. Three is a good number!
I like the three stooges.
@@dr.michaelsugrue I can't wait for the next act! 🤭
My day has been made
The best parts were a threefold: Michael's opening ephiphany about Unity or Oneness; Peter's insight about a certain pervasive melancholy and/or suffering; and Dr. Darren's deep comments about memory and trauma, and finally the comic vision of things. The use of the word "redemptive" was quite striking to me, and actually poignant in a consoling way. As for the theme of Romanticism, I heard today that Napoleon was terrible at chess, yet of course a brilliant fighter-in-the-world.
26:41 Prof. Staloff is an absolute legend 🙏
He is a badass.
@@dr.michaelsugrue agreed.
There's no vaccine for reality, only acquired natural immunity.
Suffering is freedom
Atleast that's what i tell myself...
Amazing conversation about the humanities and why its dark depths are as important as its rays of light. Keep it up!
CAN'T GET ENOUGH OF DR. SUGRUE....THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU
Wow I took some of Peter’s courses at Canterbury and now he appears on this. Small world
How did I miss this? My notifications must be whacked. I always choose this first.
I now have watched this 2 times and now this is the 3rd time.
Please we need an episode on Oscar wilde. I hate to sound ungrateful, this is my fav channel
Such a pleasure watching this amazingly intelligent and interesting conversation!
Very timely lecture. Wondering when Mike became a curmudgeon? In his taped lectures, he's so inspired and full of energy it comes through the screen lol. Appreciate you gentlemen taking the time to help try to steer this floundering and lost world. 🙏
Yeah seems like a different person know. Perhaps academia and taking the vax killed his spirit
Love the addition of Peter. Great content as always!
You guys are THE BEST fireside chat on the internet.mmmmmm😊
The Romantic sings the songs of Paradise while marching towards Perdition.
Love you, Dr. Sugrue.
Love to see them live
"People find meaning in their suffering through refined taste"..... LOL!!!!!!!😂😂😂.
Great channel!! I've learnt so much from you.
For those like me less culturally sensitive and sophisticated than Dr. Staloff, "Tamujin" refers to Genghis Khan, "Haythorne" he of the Scarlet Letter et al. . (And Paris should be pronounced Pa- REE. Ne l'oubliez jamais)
Really fun discussion to listen to and unwind. More please.
Keep posting. Thank you!
It was just heating up, 40 min felt like 4 min. so enjoyable and so important
Greatest start to a podcast lol! Still an amazing discussion.
Where be your gibes now, your gambols, your songs, your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar.
thank you for your contribution
What's so painful though about engaging with such greatness is the fact that I am, by comparison to the great authors, artists, and thinkers of the past, completely duspensiible and a nobody. This makes me melancholic. Is there a remedy? Ought I like Robert Burton write 1000 pages about my condition only to trace a full circle over my bupkis pupik?
There is. There is something intrinsically unique about you and what you bring to the world that no one else can. Write 1000 words about what that is: distil it, hone it, and make daily efforts to walk in complete alignment with it.
I just tell myself: if I'm gonna be mediocre and dispensible, then I might as well try to not be. Worst case scenario I'm still mediocre and dispensible but I tried not to be.
@Robloxman226 Ah good attitude!
Keep doing this videos guys 🚀🚀
Please keep doing this. Thank you
Dr Field, please bring these legends to Aotearoa. I'm sure the UoC could fund !
Mike’s drinking horn - I just love these convos
Nice talk! I espionage liked the question about the melancholic nature of the two, but I was kind of surprised by Darren‘s answer. Not because it doesn’t fit him, but because how well this description fits him. Truthfully, I very much appreciate the talks between the „older versions“ and in some ways I even like them better than the younger ones. They both are excellent, of course. But it‘s very interesting and refreshing to see you both from this perspective and to get to know you from this side!
Great point Darren about the necessity to develop a thick skin
What a time to be alive
another banger. and blood meridian is a sacred text
It was indeed Romanticism that gave and still gives us "Man." I finally grasped this today while reflecting about Foucault. And by the way thank you, Michael, for that great introduction to Foucault. Kant gave us, "Man." Before we could accept this gift, something had to be "sacrificed." ( Foucault had to get past his Jesuit upbringing and his self-loathing so that he himself could become a kind of sacrifice)... Kant--the "great destroyer," said Mendelssohn. Yes, he destroyed that Angry Old Father, "God."... But don't we already have a New Man in the meeting between Priam and Achilles? in the "Antigone" and in Euripedes? And then of course down at the Piraeus? History is indeed Aeshylus' work, and Thucydides',this humanistic-Hegelian "refinement" of Consciousness, this "divine romance," as Yogananda calls it. In terms of the "dialectic" Darren underlines, Leonard Cohen's lines come back to haunt: "Give me back the broken night...Give me Stalin [that prayer has been answered in Putin] and St. Paul..." In a song, George Harrison poignantly pleads to be "free from birth." But McCartney (light) needs Lennon (darkness) for there to be genius. Romanticism, for its joy to be complete, requires the natality theme, the births: the birth of tragedy, the birth of madness and the clinic; the birth of prison life--a la Foucault's epic Nietzscheanism.( I prefer Hannah Arendt, on the theme of natality.) Finally, with Heidegger and Leo Strauss and Voegelin, a nail is driven into the coffin of "salvation history" and its positivistic abstractions, its "progress": The Great War and Junger come to mind... And now with our own death wish, we are all looking forward to the climax in Ukraine. Meanwhile, nature has reared its realistic head again, in the apocalyptic earthquakes in Turkiyeh and Syria. And this has become an occasion for a certain temporary unity once again of nature and history and humanity, on a global scale no less. Biden for President.
Fucking brilliant post mate.
@@kaimarmalade9660 Thank you. I'm trying to remember what I said so I can do that again...
@@jdzentrist8711 I sooooooo know the feeling. It's the curse of a Jazzman; being able improvise symphonies but not remember them directly after! I suppose an ironic, "long live the Oral culture!" might be appropriate. Cheers.
Very true assessment. While I have not and never could vote for Mr Trump, I could not vote for Mr. Biden either. I think Mr. Trump the least qualified candidate since Andrew Johnson, full stop. Mr. Biden is a tad witless, does not learn from his mistakes and he is as corrupt as the Orange Messiah [laptop etc]. In my view they are both career criminals and a Trump/Biden race in 2024, which is likely to be treated as a Trump/Harris race, would be dire for the country. Suppose, hypothetically that Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden both suffered rapid onset dementia just prior to the national presidential debates. How would anybody in the audience be able to tell? Have you ever seen video of VP Harris attempting to state her thoughts coherently? I would sooner be governed by any three names taken at random from the (metaphorical) phone book. You have some very fine thoughts but I think you underestimate the corruption of our political class, who refuse to end legacy admissions at the best unis and allow members of Congress to legally trade stocks on the basis of classified info that would be prosecuted as insider trading for anyone else.
@Michael Sugrue I admire you sir, I wrote an essay (it is still in the rough draft phase) on virtue I will present in college. Would you mind to evaluate it? You are the backbone to which this paper is predicated.
Thanks,
Ronnie D.
Look me up on substack
Yes.. plumbed the depths of this one..And I have to bring it back to the Oyster! So.. a question to ProfSugrue after “ throws level after level after level of stuff over..turn something awful into the most valuable part of you..” Does religion, on your part, come into this? If not how have you turned it?
There is a wonderful bird called the Oystercatcher( now that is something I can talk to you about without you getting bored- in fact I guarantee you would be so engrossed that you would forget your horn).. anyway where am I ? Oh yes.. I have followed this bird for many a year without it giving me its treasure. Quite prominent in quarries, but without the bloody Oyster!!
Wow, that's intense, and really good. Not good as always good, but good good 😊
They plunge the depths and come up laughing, saying they're enjoying this.
Good job you wonderful mennnnnn. Another espisode is tomorrow or next week?
33:55 yes and also in the original prohibition which sparked our desire- “And from the fruit of the tree that is in the garden, God said, You shall not eat from it, nor shall you touch it, lest you die.” -Gen. 3:3
I don’t know what precisely Dr. Field had in mind when trying to draw out a distinction from Sugrue on aesthetics, but I seem to recall a lecture on this channel from his Great Courses days in which Sugrue distinguished aesthetics from ethics. The one is purely of pleasure while the other is not. And insofar as ethics are moral, then one can’t be moral unless you truly work at being moral, otherwise it’s aesthetic. The point being morals and ethics are principles that one labors to achieve, and if not then the thing is aesthetic, and dare I say, merely superficial.
Primo Levi the Italian Jew/writer tells a great story in one of his memoirs of Auschwitz.
He was sent to fetch soup with another prisoner, a rare occasion to socialize, but the other guy didn't speak Italian. So Primo Levi tried to teach him some Italian from Dante.
Eventually, the two prisoners got back with the soup. Primo Levi concludes the essay with a quote from Canto 28 in the Inferno, where Ulysses/Odysseus recounts in hell how he died.
After returning to Ithaca from the Trojan War, which took him ten years (as recounted in Homer's Odyssey), Ulysses got bored and set sail once more to reach the pillars of Hercules at the ends of the earth, I think in Spain.
Primo Levi quotes the words of Ulysses about how men were created to pursue virtue and high knowledge, not to live like brutes. And the final words of Levi's essay come from Ulysses's conclusion of his story, how once they reached the pillars of Hercules, in a quest for virtue and high knowledge, they came to the limits of their being:
"And over our heads the hollow seas closed up."
For Primo Levi, that quote symbolized what it felt like to go back to the barracks after fetching soup and talking Dante. That's what the humanities meant in Aushwitz. Georg Lukacs the great Marxist philosopher concluded after Aushwitz and the Gulag that Marxism or any ideology must be rooted in humanism, not vice versa.
5:50 so true, there's many ways to understand and experience the world, philosophy/literature, art or science.. all have same value,.. btw i think every aspect of our society has a natural root, culture, values, finanaces.. like we build walls around us to protect against the wind and the rain,.. we also create religion to protect from the psychological aspects of nature and being mortal..
These are great. Can someone please tell me the personal religious beliefs of these 3 people?
That melancholy is something I relate to. It derives from the Nordic, Norweigian and German. But there's plenty of the Southern in me (us) too, in my case a dash of Mali and Jewish to spice up the Iberian, as if that needed spicing. I didn't mean to be too familiar by using first names, but you guys are in my den, my house, as well as being so distant. And I feel as if I've been invited into your homes as well...This one went by so fast, amazing. The addition of Dr. Field was a stroke of genius, adding to the magic. Was watching a TV ad today, for some gambling app, "Drag King." The Black comic, I don't know his name. But he's a genius. His spiel is an ingrained "defense mechanism"--think Rodney Dangerfield or Jonathan Winters. The root of this is fear. But quickly it becomes a manic-neurotic celebration of life, so spontaneously redemptive and winning. It was art. It was Kafka. By the way Schelling made note of this very melancholy Peter attributed here. That's what I heard.
Waiting for the next upload 🤧
That was marvelous, I had to go for a walk to parse it and buy a beer so I could join this symposium. I have to say Darren stole the show. I agree with him 100% that the best way to help people overcome trauma is to triple it, it's relative, the same as morality.
I also agree that the role of Humanities has always been to teach people an understanding of life that enables them to develop coping mechanisms and resilience in the face of adversity.
Nobody mentioned Foucault, Peterson called Foucault a horrible demented little man. He doesn't like him because Foucault was right. In the biggest inversion of the hierarchies in the last two millennia the weak overcame the strong and a collaboration of weak individuals established hierarchical structures to impose their will and protect their own selfish interests. Scholars such as Galileo were condemned as heretics. And then the organisations of psychiatry and psychology took on the role of social order and social justice in collaboration with the penal system.
Humanities then had to take a back seat as they indoctrinated people in a manner that created customers for themselves, but also served the treadmill of production and control of the masses.
They cough, Michael, I love your cough
If the bridge between science and art is design, are the humanities bridging the gap between logic and myth?
Philosophy and the humanities supersede psychology, people do expect fantasies and happy endings, everything is sold on an expectation of a feeling and most peoples actions are motivated by their feelings. Even the concept of love is manipulated so it can be monetized to best effect. You mentioned Romeo and Juliet the other day, one of the greatest love stories of all time, it was a tragedy. As Seneca said " in times of fortune brace yourself" but it's better to swing the shit out of the pendulum rather than live a mediocre life as a result of fear.
Who was Tumergen? I tried searching for the name on the internet and came up with nothing.
it's Genghis Khan
@@skcool0405 Thanks!
Can someone please tell me what the word is at 36:27 ? It sounds like "...this is the difference between geiser visenshouft and humanism".
Geisteswissenschaften
@@dr.michaelsugrue Thank you Professor Sugrue. I'm a huge appreciator of your work. I hope you finish your book on the history of the world. I've been listening to your lectures everyday and love how you bring yesterday and today together with succinct insights that remind the listener of what a moral life looks like. I won't pretend that a single listening is enough and I can't pretend that a simple thank you in a comment section is enough to express my gratitude for your work. And if this is actually Genevieve (I understand that you do most of the answering) my thanks again. We are all blessed by your efforts here and on the podcast.
I feel like I'm time traveling, watching the pony tail gangster and sugar mike for so many hours in 1990's world, and now they are old people...real old people...with no progression, like Biff from 1955, to Biff with a cane
The whole of the moon 😀
Brilliant, Dr. Sugrue analysis of Abolition and the 1 million who fought, on both sides, and the South's pride that is slipping away. Read Shelby Foote and one will be enlightened and amazed. Just as you are here.
AND the global universal is inherent in all of humanity so in a way it's a generational unlearning.
I wonder what the consensus would have been on things like horror movies, or those very confronting drive-in nasties of yesteryear that people like Tarantino and other directors consider guilty pleasures. I mean can you go too far with thickening your skin? At what point does it get weird, unhealthy and cruel? I don't want to be in some morality bubble and not be able to handle even fictitious violence, but I struggle with the place of this kind of thing in a modern culture.
I think the entire genre is pathological. I want nothing to do with it.
@@dr.michaelsugrue yes it does seem rather vice driven.
You gotta laugh cause it's all so absurd, when there's time for a break from the mental gymnastics. Staying busy helps.
You both come from Greece and Jerusalem .
8:33 On Man.
PF: “So we go into the library for example, or your library behind you!!” Brilliant! In one sharp shift( Darren might even twist his wrist in mid air and say something like Gestalt) he tells you about your Magic Mountain! and the interpretation of the learned gent of Georg Lukacs( dots/ dashes/ inflections? omitting) being perhaps laughed at? Not sure if Darren agrees but you give it 5 stars nevertheless! Oh Mann… However Schopenhauer would be more impressed with the size of your library( going by size only without the titles( which many auditors are waiting with bated breath for you to divulge))compared with Peters! For the Auditors… please never take the slant of dick swinging..So much more subtle than that! I love this channel.. It’s never for posterity but it’s fashionable, good fun and brilliantly done!
I'd like to say something about this.
I was going to let this go but I can't, Wittgenstein reduced philosophy to nothing more than mental maturation, a game of soggy biscuit for academics.
Peterson despises Foucault but I bet he thinks the sun shone out of Wittgenstein's ass, he studied Wittgenstein because he is a master of rhetoric. Wittgenstein was a sophist, as is Peterson.
OMG ... three extra-large egos and a lot of one-upmanship. (I expected better.)
too short