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Hello, everyone. I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophize This, and boy, oh boy, am I excited today, because I'm in the presence of a man that I've looked up to for quite some time now, since I was but a child. A man who carries a list of accomplishments so vast, so extensive, that to even try to mention them right now would be a lost cause, because I'd run out of the valuable time that he's bestowed upon me. Professor of Philosophy at City University of New York.
A New York Times contributor, the CEO and founder of the How to Be a Stoic blog, celebrity philosopher, astronaut, Nobel laureate, Massimo Pigliucci. How are you today, my friend? I am very good. I am definitely not a former astronaut, and probably not many of the things you mentioned also, but still, it's a pleasure to be here. Look, man, you've got to pad the resume a little bit. We're living in the era of Monster.com. Everybody's doing it. Anyway, out of respect to your time, I want to delve right into the questions.
So the last few episodes of the show we've been talking about David Hume, right? And I think so much of understanding what these thinkers were trying to get at back in their time is removing our own modern cultural biases from the equation. So much of making someone like a David Hume relatable to people in modern times is understanding the historical, cultural, and political context that he's operating from.
I'd like to put ourselves into the shoes of David Hume. I'd like to put you into the 17th century leather buckled shoes that David Hume no doubt would have been in. Put yourself in David Hume's buckled shoes for a second, and can you speak briefly on A, what is this political, cultural, historical climate that he's existing in? And B, as David Hume is writing his anthology of work over the course of his lifetime, what questions are facing his generation, and what questions did David Hume think that he was answering?
Well, those are excellent questions. I mean, first of all, I do think you're right. It's important to understand the
in the historical context because otherwise one falls into a sort of typical fallacy of historical research, which is often referred to as presentism, that is projecting our present understanding of things on people that wrote hundreds or maybe even thousands of years ago and coming up short because, of course, that's entirely unfair, right? Those people did not have the body of knowledge, scientific knowledge,
philosophical or otherwise that we do have that we're living in a different place that we're living in a different culture
So it is important to do what you're suggesting. That said, in my mind at least, unless you're specifically interested in the history of ideas and the history of philosophy in particular, my own interest in people like David Hume is because they actually, I still think, have something relevant to say to the present day, to people living today. So maybe we'll get there later. But to go specifically to answer your question, so Hume was
was in the middle of the Enlightenment. Now, we typically think of the Enlightenment as
largely a French and/or continental phenomenon, but in fact it spread throughout Europe. And Hume was part of the so-called Scottish alignment. In fact, he was arguably the most prominent exponent of it. He did visit France. He was in Paris for a while, and he was in fact a guest, a very highly regarded guest at some of the major salons in Paris. So he actually had opportunity to talk directly
interact directly with the full soft spot in in france uh... he was also coming therefore after you know the very end of sort of a long uh... tale of uh... religiously motivated uh... and enforced uh... suppression of uh... uh... free thinking and sort of independent yes you know uh... people were still risking of being burned at the stakes as as uh... which is in scotland and at the time that new was
writing, which is why some of his stuff actually got published on the posthumously. His dialogues concerning natural religion, for instance, which essentially present still today one of the best arguments against intelligent design
He was not comfortable publishing those during his lifetime, and his friends advised him not to do so. So they came out actually after his death in 1776. So that's the kind of – now, in part, that's kind of the cultural background. Now, what was he thinking that he was doing? Well, he was embarking in nothing –
short of a rebuilding of philosophy, the way he thought about it. He was influenced, of course, largely by the new natural history, what we today refer to as science, so Galileo, Newton, all those people, and the successes of natural history. And he was sort of comparing that to what he saw as the
very unsuccessful and sort of sterile set of tradition, philosophical traditions that we today call scholasticism. And so he was rejecting essentially medieval philosophy, and he was embracing, he was looking for some kind of new way of doing philosophy. And the new way of doing philosophy that he came up with
was essentially to embrace the empirical sciences. A lot of what Jung was saying was that in modern terms, something on the lines of if you want to do epistemology, you also have to do psychology. And if you want to do what we today would call philosophy of mind, you better pay attention to what later became the cognitive sciences and so on and so forth. If you want to study causality, you better know something about physics.
If you want to study morality, you better know something about anthropology and what we today would call comparative anthropology and so on and so forth. So this was very much an empirical – of course, Hume is considered one of the empiricists in philosophy together with Locke and Berkeley.
But it was a very much empirically oriented philosophy, very much in constant dialogue with science itself. And this is something, of course, that in turn highly disturbed philosophers of a more rationalistic bend and dissonance.
most famously Kant. You know, Kant, a lot of what Kant wrote, especially initially, was in fact a reaction to Hume. He famously said, you know, that Hume woke him up from his slumber. And so even though Kant rejected a lot of what Hume was saying, he credited Hume with essentially making him think out of the box and sort of posing some really
tough questions that philosophy ought to answer. Well, in the same way that Hume, you know, awoke Kant from his dogmatic slumber, I feel like this awakening process, this awakening process, is not just something that happened in the area of epistemology or metaphysics and then that was it. It's analogous to what was going on in the rest of the world during this time too. I mean, the level of change that was going on in the average person's life during this time period is just...
absolutely enormous. It really was like an entirely new species was emerging. I'm curious to know what you think about this. When David Hume's applying this skeptical eye that we're talking about to the assumptions that people were making in philosophy before him,
Do you think any part of him is trying to prevent, you know, genius from being squandered? Like, in the way that Newton spent much of his life studying alchemy and the Bible and, you know, trying to find the fountain of youth, in the same way that Descartes built this entire elaborate rationalistic system on top of a foundation that we have, an incorporeal soul, do you think there's any part of Hume that's trying to prevent this from happening again?
Well, that's an interesting question. I don't know that there is any textual evidence for that. Well, in part there is. Hume was definitely critical of Descartes, and essentially along the lines that we've been discussing. So that interpretation, as far as Descartes is concerned, is very tenable.
Newton is a different issue because actually both the kind of philosophy that Hume studied and in fact even interestingly Kant himself, even though he was a very different kind of philosopher, they were both very impressed by natural philosophy.
by science, in particular by the accomplishments of people like Galileo and Newton. So actually Newton and his ilk were a role model. Now you're right, however, they were referring, of course, to the scientific aspect of Newton's work, not to the biblical interpretations or to exegesis or to alchemy, which Newton spent an inordinate amount of time doing. In fact, he spent more time doing
I understand biblical exegesis than doing physics. Now, would have Jung thought that this was a waste of time? Very likely. Yes, I would think so. I don't think that there is any direct textual evidence for that, but it's hard to imagine that he wouldn't. All right. Fair enough. So as an intellectual pillar in the philosophical world –
you've had many opportunities made available to you that a lot of other people could never say that they had. You've served on panels with, you've had discussions with, you've debated several key players in the new atheist movement in modern times, including, but not limited to, the Four Horsemen of the Atheist Apocalypse. Now, pull up practically any debate by these gentlemen on YouTube, and you'll find that if, you know, if they're the Four Horsemen of the Atheist Apocalypse...
David Hume is the horse that they rode into town on, right? Whether they're loosely referencing his thought, whether they're explicitly quoting the guy, David Hume is a part of these discussions that are going on. My question to you is this. What would he think of the new atheist movement? Would he be a fan of these people? Would he be sympathetic to their cause? Would he be one of the horsemen himself? Or would his skepticism be too strong and not allow him to be?
Yeah, I don't think Hume will appreciate the new atheism the way it is often characterized. Hume was, if you read his biography, Hume was a very congenial kind of guy. He was always trying to be very nice to people and sort of very, you know, he was firm in his intellectual positions. You know, he was not shy to sort of engage intellectually.
in debates throughout Europe with other people about his positions. But he was also very famously very friendly and very open to sort of discussion. In fact, there is an episode, if I remember correctly, in Paris where he was asked whether he was an atheist and he demurred. He said, "No, I don't think a reasonable person should label himself that way."
So there is both in terms of character and sort of attitude and also in terms of philosophical skepticism. I don't think that Hume would be particularly comfortable with the New Atheist Movement. What he would be comfortable with is some kind of sort of positive, what I would call positive skepticism. You know that the skeptic movement, one of the most famous phrases in the skeptic movement is the one that originated with Carl Sagan.
That is that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, right? And it actually technically didn't even originate. Sagan made it famous. The originator of the phrase was one of the other founders of the Skeptical Inquirer magazine. But regardless of that, we have all heard that phrase, right? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Now, that essentially is David Hume.
Hume didn't put it that way. He put it more interestingly, I think, and actually more broadly as the idea that an educated person ought to proportion his beliefs to the evidence. Yeah.
Yes, so not just the extraordinary claims every claim has to be proportioned to the evidence, right? Of course if the claim is extraordinary, you really do need extraordinary evidence But if the claim is ordinary you still need evidence in order to believe it So in that sense I think David Hume is the father not as much of the atheist movement as but as of the skeptic movement and
That said, of course, the boundaries between atheism and skepticism and all these other, you know, and rethinking and humanism today is very porous. I mean, a lot of the same people hang around those circles, although they don't completely overlap. There are some skeptics who are definitely not atheists, and I know some atheists who definitely could use a dose of skepticism about some of their beliefs outside of atheism.
uh... the supernatural so uh... but i i i think that june would be uh... uh... will put himself outside of the fray in terms of you know from a looking at it from a distance uh... and it would be happy to engage uh... with people in discussions and would definitely not be uh... shy about defending his positions but he but he would not actually be consider himself annuated uh... i mean you
You put me in that category, but quite frankly, I model myself after Hume. I don't like to think of myself as a new atheist. I certainly am an atheist. But I think I try to model myself toward a more reasonable and more congenial model of David Hume than, let's say, of Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins. Still, you read stories about David Hume going to church every Sunday of his life.
Like, what's your read on that? Do you think that it was a token of submission, you know, with the witch burnings in the back of his head somewhere? Perhaps or perhaps it was simply just I mean, we don't know, unfortunately, a lot about this because his own autobiography is very, very short. He wrote it at the end of his life when when he was he knew it was about, you know, it was going to die soon.
and so he put down a few notes basically by himself. So it's hard to say. I think that an equally reasonable interpretation is simply that he was a member of a community, and that's the kind of behavior that was expected by the community, and he wasn't one to raffle fetters unnecessarily. He knew that his philosophy was already raffling a lot of fetters anyway. He had been denied twice in academic appointment precisely on the ground that he was considered an atheist. So I think...
I think that he didn't look for a fight unnecessarily. And so if everybody in the community goes to church, sure, I'll go to church. But everybody knows what I believe or don't believe. And so they're not going to be fooled for a minute. In fact, there's this interesting story that when he was sick at the end of his life, he was still receiving friends and even foes in his house. And there were these local clergy who –
would go on a regular basis hoping to see a deathbed conversion of the great atheist or the great agnostic, as he was sometimes referred to. And they never got it. And in fact, they got kind of pissed off by the fact that Jung kept inviting them in and welcoming them in his house and being congenial about the whole thing. But he was firm in his beliefs, or I should say disbelief in this case, all the way to the end. He never wavered on that.
But just think of how much more he could have gotten done if he had that three hours every Sunday morning, if he just spent that doing philosophy. Think of how much more he could have accomplished. Anyway, that actually moves nicely into the next question I have, because we have the luxury of looking 300 years into the past. We know what subsequent human thought has been 300 years after David Hume. Now, I'm wondering, you personally, let's say you could go back in a time machine, let
Let's say that you could look at David Hume directly in his eyes as he's sitting on his armchair doing philosophy. What is the one piece of advice that you would give him, the one maybe assumption that he's making that would have taken him to the next level? Oh, boy, that's an excellent question. I don't know that I have a ready answer for it, but I think that what I would do is actually advise him to publish the work that eventually did get out only after his death, to publish them now.
not to wait because I think that there is a good chance, first of all, that they would have had an even larger impact than they already did. But more importantly is that he would have been freed
from those works. You know, he kept revising this stuff like we all do before publication up until the end. And he would have been freed of those particular works and perhaps incentivized to do something to keep writing new things. Now, it is
We need to note that Hume did actually not write any new philosophy for a large chunk of his last part of his life. He devoted himself to other things. In fact, mostly he became famous as a historian. He wrote this stupendous history of England. So one piece of advice maybe that I would give him would be to just waste less time writing.
Not with the history, because history was very good, but waste less time with things like diplomatic efforts and chatting with people and actually get down to resume his philosophy. At some point in his life, he was convinced that he didn't have anything new to say in philosophy, and I think that probably was giving up a little too early.
Why do you think his good friend Adam Smith refused to publish his work after his death? What do you think he was scared of happening? I think Adam Smith was a chicken. You know, he was, with all due respect, because he was in his own right actually a very good philosopher. But yeah, he was a coward. Yeah, he was just a coward. He's just somebody who...
He was very keenly aware of still the dangers in publishing the kind of stuff that Hume was writing and therefore also in editing it and becoming an instrument for publication. And so he just declined, even though his best friend apparently, or one of his best friends at least, asked him to do so explicitly.
Now, let me just say, I completely apologize to anybody who's a surviving member of the Adam Smith estate. Look, I think that Adam Smith had a considerable amount of courage to completely overthrow mercantilism when he himself probably thought that it was based on corrupt relationships between chiefs of industry and the leaders of government. I mean, that could have just as easily landed him in the stockade or burned at the stake. I guess he only wanted to take so many risks, right? Yeah, true. His willpower was exhausted. All right, so...
There's that famous quote, you are the sum total of the five people that you spend the most time with. That's you. Well, what happens with me is whenever I spend a considerable amount of time reading one of these philosophers, I start to become them. Like, I start to pick up pieces of their personality. I start to feel like they're a part of me in some weird way. My question to you is this. As someone who has read more than his fair share of David Hume over the years,
Has his thinking ever influenced you in your personal life? Has there ever been a life decision that you've had to make where you take a piece of Hume's thinking and you use it in a practical way? Good question. So, first of all, you're right. When you spend a lot of time with any author, really not just philosophers, but any author, you start, if not thinking like him or her, you certainly are deeply influenced by
And, you know, it sort of becomes almost a second nature, at least for the period that you're devoting so much effort and time to that particular author. And actually, I think that that is one of the great things about philosophy in particular, but also sort of about, you know, reading what used to be called the great books. That is, you're in this constant conversation with people who are dead. And yes, they're mostly white people.
people who are dead. I don't have a problem with that, and I assume that's because I'm a white man myself. But nonetheless, I engage very willingly with anybody who had anything interesting to say, regardless of gender and race. It just happened, of course, to be the case that most of the canon in philosophy, in Western philosophy, is from a particular type of author. But regardless of those considerations, I
I mean, that is one of the beautiful things about studying philosophy, that you do get into this constant conversation with a lot of the, you know, some of the greatest minds that have come out of humanity. And it's a privilege to me, for me to be able to do that as a profession. Therefore, you know, I don't need an excuse for it. If in the morning I get out of bed and have my coffee and crack Play-Doh open or the Stoics or David Hume, I'm doing my job.
And it's really a privilege. Now, in terms of specific decisions, that's an interesting question in and of itself. I can't think of a specific decision, but I can definitely tell you
that especially Hume's dictum that we mentioned a few minutes ago of proportioning your beliefs to the evidence, that affects every decision that I make. That affects every conversation that I have. So it's really deeply entrenched in me at this point. And so right there, it's a tribute to these men who wrote this stuff 300 years ago. And he's with me basically every day, even if I don't read him every day.
Can you think of any exceptions to that? Like, are there any decisions that we make in life that run contrary to whatever empirical evidence is right in front of us at the time? I try not to. I mean, even, you know, of course, the obvious example would be, well, really, did you fall in love, for instance, because of the evidence? Well, yes, in some sense. Yeah.
Absolutely. I know it sounds weird to put it that way, and certainly you're not necessarily thinking of it that way while it's happening, because there's a lot of emotion involved. By the way, Hume would appreciate that, because he famously said that reason by itself doesn't
doesn't get you any motivation for action. In fact, he famously and provocatively said that reason is and ought to be the slave of passions, right? So his point was that unless you actually care about something, unless you have emotional involvement in something, it doesn't matter what reason tells you. Reason is instrumental.
in his mind to achieving your goals and your goals are set by what you care about. So I think actually you would not be surprised by hearing me saying something like that. But yes, even things like falling in love and staying in love, staying in a relationship is based on
experience on the fact that you know you see this person actually cares for you and does things for you and talks to you and interacts with you on a regular basis now if I were coming home in my my partner were just clubbing me on the on the hand every time that I got past the door I was having doubts
Wait, she's not supposed to do that? No, I don't think so. I think this may be why I'm in a loveless marriage. It's crumbling beneath me right now. This is good to know. I should have proportioned my belief to the end. Exactly. So one more question, and then I'll let you go. You can continue revolutionizing the philosophical world all by yourself.
But I want to switch gears here for a second to your blog, the How to Be a Stoic blog. I feel like anything I say about it is going to be grotesquely inaccurate. I'm wondering, for the sake of me and for the audience, can you maybe talk a little bit about it and how you got into it and why you care about it so much?
So the blog is called How to Be a Stoic, which apparently is going to be the title of a book that I will be writing beginning next fall. I'm in contact with a number of publishers about this. And this came out actually of something sort of –
somewhat serendipitous. So I've been practicing Stoicism as a philosophy, as a practical philosophy, which is what it's meant to be anyway, for a few months now. That's because I just got more interested in it. I started reading more. There is a movement to bring back Stoicism as an alternative to, let's say, secular Buddhism or something like that for the modern mind for the 21st century. So I got interested in it and I started reading and all that.
And then I wrote an op-ed piece about it in the New York Times, and that piece was called How to Be a Stoic, in which I recounted my personal experiences, my version of stoic meditations, my version of stoic mindfulness, and so on and so forth.
And I didn't think about it twice. I said, OK, this is going to be a nice little thing to do for the New York Times. It's obviously something that is always an outlet that is always a pleasure to publish in. But I didn't think this was going to be that much of a big deal. And then the following day, the editor at the Times sends me this email and says, you know, Massimo, your article is actually the most –
emailed article on the site and I said wow you mean on the stone site because this came out in the New York Times philosophy blog which is called the stone and he said no the entire New York Times site and
I said, wow, this many people are interested in ancient philosophy, and that's something astonishing. But even so, even at that point, I said, okay, well, that's interesting. That's good to know. It makes me feel better, and it made my day and all that. But then I sort of let it stay there, and then within a few hours, I got –
emails from a number of publishers asking me to turn that op-ed piece into a book. I said, "Okay." Apparently, there's a lot of interest about this stuff. So that's what I'm doing. I've been working with my agent about working on this project, which I will start, as I said, probably in the fall because actually, as it turns out, I have another book that I'm finishing in a moment for Chicago Press.
So then I thought, okay, why don't we turn this into an ongoing project? I started the blog, and the blog is helping me basically sort of crystallizing my own ideas about stoicism, both ancient and modern. And of course, I figured, well, this could also be a good resource for other people interested. And sure enough, it's working out that way. Basically, whenever I read something interesting, I put out some excerpts of my readings, and
with a commentary on the blog and then people come in and ask questions, add their own comments and it's sort of an ongoing project. So yeah, you'll find it at howtobestoic.org.
Was there a significant difference that you noticed between the way you felt, you know, pre-Stoicism in your life versus post-Stoicism in your life? Like, you can obviously remember a time in your life when you weren't using Stoic principles. If something bad happened to you, if that inevitable adversity came your way, that the world throws you, the bonds of fate, like, what's the difference between the way you'd react? How would you react then versus how would you react now? And what specific actionable techniques would you recommend
for somebody that's trying to overcome a bout of adversity in their life right now? I can tell you that my friends and my partner have seen a significant change over the last few months since I started practicing stoicism. For one thing, I got much less irritable than I was before.
And that's because I really try to practice the stoic idea that there are some things that are entirely under your control, and that is how you react to things, how you think about things. There are other things that are not under your control, and then there are sort of things that are in between. And what you do with the things in between is you try your best –
to achieve certain results, but then whatever happens, happens, and you try not to get upset about it. And it really does help. You have to do it as a practice. You can't just say that to yourself, what I just said to yourself once, and then it's done. You do it basically every day. Every day I write in my philosophical diary, and I go over...
Like Seneca suggested and like Epictetus suggested, I go over what I did during the day and how I reacted, and I make a mental note of how to improve it the next time around. And it does improve little by little, of course. Nobody's perfect, but the Stoics themselves will tell you nobody's ever going to reach the level of a sage, which was this sort of ideal level.
that, however, never exists in any particular person that the Stoics modeled themselves after. So there is that. There is also the fact that I always try to be somewhat the best ethical person that I can, I suppose. Let's put it that way and sort of be mindful of my choices, everyday choices. But since a large part of Stoicism, a big part of Stoicism is to be ethically mindful
throughout the day about every decision you make. You're always supposed to ask yourself, well, what are the ethical consequences of this thing? So I actually started doing that more systematically, and this has turned into immediate changes. For instance, I closed my bank account and opened a different one with a local bank because my previous bank was one of these large corporate outlets that had engaged in a number of clearly unethical
practices and so I said well okay I don't want to be associated I don't want to give my money to those people so I looked for a local credit union and that sort of stuff and I changed my practice I also redoubled my efforts in sort of eating for instance in an ethical fashion I was doing that already before but
this idea, this stoic idea, again, of being constantly mindful of what you do and the implications of what you do has actually been very helpful. It's now kind of second nature for me whenever I do something, whenever I have to make a decision to say, well, what would the sage do? Sort of. And, you know, what would Socrates do or something like that? And then I try to model myself afterwards, of course, imperfectly and, you know, with the usual failures of every human being. But nonetheless, at least you're trying.
Massimo, you are truly a living legend. Check out his blog at howtobeastoic.wordpress.com. Thank you so much for your time. It was a pleasure.