About Reality Podcast: Recent Episodes
E. S. Dallaire
Here is a philosopher out in the world, the wilderness, the cosmos, walking down every path looking for the Way. He reads a lot of books and talks about them on this show.
Low energy episode. First one recorded in weeks, and I'm uploading it to see how it feels. Another idea for this episode's title could be: 'Moments of Empty Satisfaction'.
Peace and love to you
A guest episode with Nikole, wherein we discuss David Foster Wallace's 'Infinite Jest' and the societal problems which the individuals in his novel must grapple and cope with, as they realize in this life they have one of two choices to make: succumb to endless pleasure for lack of any other option, or else delay their gratification for the sake of a lifestyle that is healthier for them mentally and physically.
Picked this book up at a used book store two weeks ago - just getting started on it, and so far it is dynamite!
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This episode is relaunching the series, so in it I spend time stating what is the purpose and intention of continuing with the 'About Reality' Podcast. I am very excited to resume podcasting about philosophy, and this episode (conveniently a round number, at 50) is the beginning of a much more regular series exploring all manner of philosophical ideas, from the past as well as -- maybe -- from the present, so long as we find philosophers in the present stating new things that turn out to be necessary for the conduct of philosophical living.
This episode about how the thoughts we are able to think are limited or bounded by the assumptions we hold about reality, including notions of time, of the freedom of the individual versus determination, etc., and how the discoveries of philosophers are phenomena used to think beyond those limits. The question is whether philosophers have discovered all that there is to uncover about humankind and their presence in the world—and then, if they have, where does that leave us in the present age?
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What does it take for an individual, or a nation, to forget what history has inscribed on their land and their psyche, in order to be able to see the reality of the moment for what it is, and resolve the historical tension and conflict diplomatically in order to envision together a different world for tomorrow? What role does philosophy play in this?
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Let's forget everything we thought we knew, without letting go of all that we've gained.
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'About Reality' Substack: https://aboutreality.substack.com/
Also, check out the YouTube channel of this series, where you can find the video recording: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCaiMn_zH9BcGGLAlNVYIcLw?app=desktop
Exploring a classical philosophical question today, owing to the past month where I've undergone a change in perspective in my valuation of knowledge gained through books and theory versus what is gained through accepting that we can't think our way out of our bodily experience and what we're bounded to in these corporeal forms filled with desire and instinct.
Thank you for tuning in! Please subscribe and rate! It's very much appreciated.
Check out the 'About Reality' Substack: https://aboutreality.substack.com/
Also, check out the YouTube channel of this series, where you can find the video recording: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCaiMn_zH9BcGGLAlNVYIcLw?app=desktop
Still searching for the philosopher as heroic figure embodying the spirit of the present age, and the need we may have, insofar as we are seekers of truth, to find someone who practices a wisdom grounded in corporeal reality while simultaneously maintaining a view toward higher, perhaps even eternal, truth. How do we do this in the globalized, modern world, using the instruments provided to us as conscious, embodied beings, even as our local, personal experience is cheapened in contrast to the globalized world.
Thank you for tuning in! Please subscribe and rate! It's very much appreciated.
Also, check out the YouTube channel of this series, where you can find the video recording: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCaiMn_zH9BcGGLAlNVYIcLw?app=desktop
This weekend I was reading the second part of Kant's 'Critique of Judgment', as well as the fourth book of volume one of Schopenhauer's 'The World as Will and Representation', and in this episode I get to talking about both of them, particularly in their relevance to the protagonist in the novel I am writing, Anatole. This project involving this podcast and my writing is coming together, folks, and you're here for the start of it! Thank you for your support!
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Here we make an argument that 'good' and 'bad' are stagnant terms for evaluating emergent phenomena in an ever-changing world, and that as terms of judgment they refer back to a static and traditionally conservative worldview, where 'good' and 'evil' are eternal presences in the cosmos and the world is a battleground between them in which humans too take part. There's certainly a case to be made for the coherent order this provides the individual desperate for a way of making sense of what is otherwise the chaos of existence, but in this episode I introduce the possibility of supplanting ethical theory with an aesthetic one that is more appropriate and accommodating of the modern world and our experience of it.
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Can a philosopher of ethics get away without a metaphysics to support or corroborate their ethical theory? Can a metaphysician get away with leaving unexamined the existence of good and evil, as well as free will, which informs good and bad action? In this episode, we use Mr. Ramsey from Virginia Woolf's 'To the Lighthouse', as well as Socrates, as exemplary case studies of one version of the philosopher—the ethicist without a metaphysics—and the other—the metaphysician whose own conduct is his blind spot when examining reality.
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So many centuries later, still we philosophers are asking the question as to the right way of being. In this episode we contribute two facts about life which may be essential to the discussion: one, that 'to be' is to have no choice but to act, in order to persist; two, that life is movement, and it resists anything that would cause it to grind to a halt. What does that have to do with the philosopher being the life of the party? Tune in to find out!
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Check out the About Reality Substack: https://aboutreality.substack.com/
Whenever I read Cormac McCarthy I always want to talk about the visionary nature of his work and aesthetic, and my current reading of 'The Crossing' is no different. We jump right into it, and by the end of the episode we come up with one definition of the value of art (that it prompts an individual to ask questions which their day-to-day life does not require them to ask), and we also contemplate the need for a conflict at the heart of an artist's work, and whether these conflicts are in fact real, or simply imagined and supported by the artist's insistence upon them, for the sake of their art.
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The episode begins with an announcement that I've started working on a novel, the choice having been made following an inspiring conversation I had this past weekend with my tattoo artist. I take a moment to explain how that might affect the release of new episodes in this podcast series. The rest of the episode explores what a novel written these days achieves, and whether that achievement is enticing for a so-called philosopher, such as myself, who would like to think they're slowly wending their way down one of the multiple pathways which sooner or later all lead to the Truth about reality. Is writing a novel a distraction from such a path, or is it just another route which ends where I think I would like to end, as philosopher? Such questions I ask in this episode.
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Speaking on consciousness in this episode, which is a question and phenomenon I don't usually dwell on as philosopher; hopefully I bring something new to the discussion with today's podcast.
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Follow E. S. Dallaire on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ESDallaire
The irony of today's social and political climate is that so many individual voices, in our so-called democracy, are insisting that their voices be heard and their status as self-defining individuals recognized for the sake of social harmony. In other words, we have individuals—call them activists—who feel within themselves that they will not rest until the group which they represent, even if it's a group of one, is acknowledged by the current social order—even if that means upending the current social order entirely. In part this is an unfair description of an activist. In part this is a consequence of many self-proclaimed activists, whose voice is so loud they are shaping the conversation, also existing within an elitist milieu, where self-assertion and a careerist mindset and agenda are a part of their conception of activism. In this episode we go deep into what is described as a 'perennial psychological drama', and we address it with a helping hand from Schopenhauer.
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Follow E. S. Dallaire on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ESDallaire
An episode inspired by a reading of the initial chapters of 'My Bondage and My Freedom' by Frederick Douglass, as well as by Frederick Douglass as a historical figure.
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Follow E. S. Dallaire on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ESDallaire
In this episode we're questioning what it means to be a philosopher in this time and place in history, rife with such conflict and turmoil. Do we measure existence according to some high standard of philosophical criteria, and cast judgment and affect change accordingly, or do we just exist, opening ourselves, as philosophers, more and more, to whatever order of existence happens to be, at the time and place of our own accidental history?
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It's not an easy discussion, and the answer is not simple, but the question of today's episode is the extent to which present ideological forces stand in the way of the philosopher's search for truth, and how have those forces impacted the philosopher's pursuit throughout history.
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Follow E. S. Dallaire on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ESDallaire
Once again finding ourselves in a world of complexity, the moment of clarity in this episode is that we've got to trust our instincts, if only we knew ourselves, etc.
Follow E. S. Dallaire on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ESDallaire
After reading “So Much Longing in So Little Space' by Karl Ove Knausgaard, in this episode we ask the same question he did in the book: what makes a work of art good, really? My position in this episode is that the 'good' or even great art object cannot be one which you experience but then go back to life as you've known it, as it's settled around you. Arguing from a more radical position, I suppose, I claim the great work of art upsets everything, shakes all that the viewer thinks they know to their very core—and, likely, hopefully, makes it impossible for the one who experiences such a great work of art to then return to life as normal. The contention I dwell on in this episode is whether the art community today really wants such art objects which shake the foundations of the known world; instead, perhaps they prefer works of art which merely accent their days spent living a late-capitalist ideal of the good, secure, stable, comfortable life.
Follow E. S. Dallaire on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ESDallaire
In the capitalist social model the house always wins, and not every individual who plays the game in the hopes of hitting big, of experiencing the windfall of all that capitalism at its height promises, is in fact going to win. The reality is that most don't, and that reality is looming every larger in the sights and mind of the collective—they are protesting this circumstance which capitalism has wrought upon the world, that the house, the system, always wins, and most individuals will end up with nothing, despite having given their life to playing the game. Is there another way of being, different from the fantasy which capitalism puts before all our eyes, which is in fact closer to, and more sustainable with, reality? This is one of the questions of our modern moment, no doubt. It's unclear who has the answer, if anyone does.
Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ESDallaire
In this episode we ask if there is any philosophical question that is unique to our time. We ask this because, on the other hand, if, despite superficial differences, the modern individual's experience of the highs and lows of this life, of their existential condition as conscious human being, is not all that different from that of any human alive at any point in the past, then the philosophical, spiritual, and scientific texts that have been passed down to us are all we need to come up with an answer as to the ways of being for our own lives in the present day.
Check out the About Reality Substack: https://aboutreality.substack.com/
Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ESDallaire
Charles Darwin, in his description of nature, revealed a mechanism far beyond what had previously been imagined. In his almost microscopic attention to the world as it is, which so many eyes prior to his work had slid over and taken for granted, his descriptions of life on this planet often sounded otherwordly, revealing a world as if of fantasy, which we'd never noticed before. In this episode, we wonder what is yet to be revealed by the one who would look as closely at what is on this Earth.
Check out the About Reality Substack: https://aboutreality.substack.com/
Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ESDallaire
If we regard the premodern search for truth and explanation for being in the materials of this earth as guided largely by superstition, as medieval alchemists sought to resolve the spiritual substance, contained in the materials of this earth as if they were vessels for it, in one potent object or formula – the lapis philosophorum – we would nonetheless be mistaken, Carl Jung posits, if we believed too that our own motive for modern, scientific investigation has changed all that much from theirs. It may be less superstitious, but it is no less impelled by desperation, wild desire, and fantasy.
Check out the About Reality Substack: https://aboutreality.substack.com/
Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ESDallaire
An introduction to the hypothesis guiding a new writing project which will be a companion piece to the philosophy being developed in this podcast series. There is a mode of investigation I've developed as philosopher, which informs this series and this new writing project, and I outline it in this episode as an introduction to how this podcast and my writing is going to develop moving forward into the indefinite future (hopefully for months to come!).
Check out the About Reality Substack: https://aboutreality.substack.com/
Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ESDallaire
How should a human creature react to a true statement? Where do we allow the written word to take us today, if anywhere? Where would a true word, written or spoken, say we are, and where does it say we're going? What has been the power of the written word throughout our history, which in our secular age we seem on guard against, providing as it does with a regaining of orientation and direction which the modern world cannot abide, for the fact that it has no patience for any statements which would reveal the shortcomings of its own project: that of 'modernity'? A true statement has always been felt as a knife piercing the illusion of ourselves we have built up, and the world as a whole has a similar self it seeks to protect from such piercing statements.
Check out the About Reality Substack: https://aboutreality.substack.com/
Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ESDallaire
What does a people fight and give their lives for? What order and sense of history does a community seek to maintain—and is it accidental or arbitrary, or is it the only thing a people has to combat the chaos inherent to the universe, which in one form or another is always threatening to consume a people's identity and way of life?
Check out the About Reality Substack: https://aboutreality.substack.com/
Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ESDallaire
This episode is mostly an elaboration upon one of the arguments in Alenka Zupancic's book 'Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan'.
Check out the About Reality Substack: https://aboutreality.substack.com/
Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ESDallaire
The perennial problem, revisited in today's age, of what the philosopher is really aiming to achieve: whether it is to align with what is, in contemplative fashion, or, as seems more favored these days, to take their so-called insight and bring into reality a future and world we want for ourselves. In this episode we are in doubt as to whether that latter option is possible, and conclude it might even be naive.
Substack entry I read in this episode: https://aboutreality.substack.com/p/feb-9-2022
Follw me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ESDallaire
The world seems to be hanging suspended, in a limbo state, caught in between the reality of the past and that of the future, the latter of which has yet to be determined, yet no one seems to be offering any clear vision of what that future reality might look like. As a result there is a lot of tension in the mind of the average individual, who no longer knows how to plan or invest for their future—they can't count on things remaining so stable as they have been for the last few decades; even the land under their feet is changing, and entire cities worth of people may soon be on the move, in need of more hospitable terrain. What is the path forward?
Check out the 'About Reality' Substack: https://aboutreality.substack.com/
Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ESDallaire
I would just like to add, as far as 'where the knowledge is found', and our relationship to the wisdom accrued through our contact with deep time – it is a wisdom to be gained through our bodies too, which are a product of deep time, of billions of years of evolution of life. This is why I emphasize the body – not that the body has or possesses such wisdom, but that it is the wisdom which we need to meditate upon.
Check out the 'About Reality' Substack: https://aboutreality.substack.com/
Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ESDallaire
Would the philosopher be wise to do so? Is it the project of the statesman? Has it been the naive project of the west all along? What mode of being, given the state of nature and the world at present, is actually the wisest of all? Such are the questions asked in this episode.
Check out the 'About Reality' Substack: https://aboutreality.substack.com/
Follow E. S. Dallaire on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ESDallaire
In the first half of this episode I reintroduce the 'About Reality' project, to outline the intention of both the podcast as well as the companion Substack as we head into the new year. In the second half I get to talking about the language the philosopher might use to capture and convey philosophical ideas that are worth considering in the world of 2022.
Check out the About Reality Substack: https://aboutreality.substack.com/
Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ESDallaire
The second stage of philosophical development is a self-discipline or even a self-denial—but toward what end?
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ESDallaire
An argument for the return of our attention to areas of linguistic, artistic, and cultural expression outside of the domain of the institutions of our time, which dominate the cultural and social narrative the individual has to attend to, for the fact that they mediate most of our cultural, and cross-cultural, communication. We have to find other spaces (call them platforms, if you'd like) in which to express our concern for other facets of the human experience, which these institutional narratives seem to be forgetting, or outright ignoring.
The first question in this episode is what is good writing, and we say the answer is that good writing is necessary writing. The second question in this episode is, what exactly is necessary to write about in the context of the modern world, and how can a (literary) writer still manage to capture it organically, given the commercialism of literature in its contemporary form?
This being a philosophical undertaking, and one of the main pursuits of philosophy as well as art: to satisfy the primitive impulse to confront the unknown, so as to overcome it, or else simply to live in its proximity.
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ESDallaire
Substack: https://aboutreality.substack.com/
You're asked, as global citizen, to never stop developing opinions on events occurring, and people speaking, likely hundreds of miles away from wherever you are situated, as individual. The task of the global citizen, on the daily, is to evaluate such information which is so far removed from your locale, where you live and breathe and work, and dream and perspire. In this episode I recommend dropping out of the global 'sense-making' project that is underway, to instead think your own thoughts, and to dwell in your own, local experience, even if the global mind forming on digital space implicitly, through their/its lack of attention given to you, says that what you are doing is of no value, or is even nonsensical, or irrational—as if your insistence on experiencing what reality you've been built up to experience, as human body and mind, made you some kind of erratic abnormality.
My Twitter: https://twitter.com/ESDallaire
My Substack: https://aboutreality.substack.com
In this episode, speculating upon what the world of tomorrow may look like, now as for the past nineteen months the whole globe seems to be suspended in this limbo state where it seems as likely to slide completely into chaos as it does into order, into absolute destruction or tyranny. Or maybe I'm being too dramatic. Too dramatic or not, how might we act today, now, when the future really does seem more uncertain than ever, is the question of today's episode. Then we end it with the flourish of a poet!
'The medium is the message,' as Marshall Mcluhan said, and in this episode I begin by talking about the media which wasn't around in Marshall Mcluhan's day, but which has come to dominate our culture now, and which certainly shapes and limits and constrains not just public discourse, but private discourse as well. I didn't get around to talking about what I meant to say in this episode, when I initially hit record, but hey – there are many more episodes to come!
Check out the essays on my Substack, which supplement the development of this podcast series:
https://aboutreality.substack.com
On this Happy Halloween episode, I follow the energetic impulse of an idea which I'd been feeling all morning, but which I hadn't yet expressed in any intelligible form, even to myself, before hitting record, and I follow this idea right to the very edge of the terrifying abyss which is the unknown; on this spooky Halloween Day, in this episode, I speculate as to why it is so easy and even natural to feel terror when confronted by this chasm. I wonder if that terror is the right response, in this time we're all living in where the known—that is, all that we have come to know about the world around us, and what we've been brought up to be, by the world—this known is perhaps what is so terrifying. Into the abyss we shall go, without terror, I say—but only if you take the plunge into it in all honesty, as if it was a necessity, and you are at peace with your conscience.
After a week of pulling double shifts at the ol' gumshoe factory, in this episode I try to find my way back to where I left my philosophical development eight days ago, while also trying to interpret the feeling which walking around the uninspired avenues of the downtown core of my city leaves me with, as of late. The world has been in a suspended state, the past year and a half, and what it looked like prior to the pandemic, and what it's going to look like after, can't possibly be the same thing. So the question is: what is the world moving toward, as it moves toward the world of tomorrow? In this episode I suggest a path forward, filled with much wild, dense, humid growth, as an aesthetic solution to the problem we're currently facing, of having no shared vision of what's next for us all.
In this episode I mentioned this essay which I wrote, called 'Tragedy as a Great Art'. Here you can read it:
https://aboutreality.substack.com/p/tragedy-as-a-great-art
The conclusion of this episode's inquiry is that our freedom to choose is bounded by what choices are available to us, in this life, in this day and age. However much the choices provided to us by life in the 21st century bounds the horizon of our experience, and limits our thought of what being is and what it could be, whether or not these bounds and limits and order which this life provides us is good or bad, or enriching, for the individual, the culture, the species, is left as a matter to question, by the end of the episode which references Socrates and the Buddha, as philosophers who saw through the veil and have become enigmatic as a result.
Check out the essays on my Substack, which supplement the development of this podcast series:
https://aboutreality.substack.com
Just as the title says, in this episode there is a definition, philosophy leading one to being 'fully conscious in the moment', or if not that, then philosophical development and inquiry being of no use to the conscious individual trying to understand life and the world and their place within it. The lingering claim in this episode is: that the mistake of our contemporary lifestyle and mode of living is to default to a linear, forward-moving, tunnel-like disposition of thought and being.
My thoughts after watching the documentary film 'Roadrunner', which follows the path to celebrity of Anthony Bourdain. Bourdain is not someone whose books I read or whose shows I watched, but as I heard the way other people spoke of him he became an intrguing cultural figure for me, and this film came highly recommended for insight into Bourdain's life. I figured it was a good place to start, if I wasn't going to go right to Bourdain's own books. Here I get to talking about why Hegel came to my mind as I watched the deterioration of this man's psychological well-being.
Check out the essays on my Substack, which supplement the development of this podcast series:
https://aboutreality.substack.com
And if so, what makes us better social animals, and what makes us worse? As social animals, what world would we choose for our social habitat? How do we gain admittance to our social milieu, but especially so that our status within society is not to be questioned, even on days when we feel lesser than what image society has of us?
Be sure to check out the essays on my Substack, which supplement the development of this podcast series:
https://aboutreality.substack.com
An analysis of language as a cutting away of the excess of things, of all in this life that is not 'it', in order to reveal what is at the core of all being, the truth which is incomprehensible for the fact that it is non-linguistic, and resists articulation, because articulation is our reaction to not being able to speak the truth at the core of being. A bit of complicated theory, but I think the episode does a good job providing an outline, if not a justification.
Check out the essays on my Substack, which supplement the development of this podcast series:
https://aboutreality.substack.com
The philosopher, just like the individual, through introspection needs to come to terms with the structures of thought and belief which shape the territory of their mind, and inform their being. We used to navigate these structures together, as individuals engaged in conversation, and it was healthiest to do so honestly. It seems there are new structures of thought, newly arisen, occupying territory in the mind of individuals—maybe given rise to by the globalizing forces of a new social reality. Structures, thoughts, beliefs, which have their origin in ideology. Whatever their merit, my experience has been that their presence makes it difficult to connect to another person on a local level, through conversation.
Check out the essays on my Substack, which supplement the development of this podcast series:
https://aboutreality.substack.com
This episode isn't all about politics, though peppered throughout is an overview of the imminent Canadian federal election. The real concern of the episode is an existential analysis of an individual's relationship to the future, and of a life lived in preparation for the unexpected, whether that's necessary or worthwhile.
Check out the essays on my Substack, which supplements the development of this podcast series:
https://aboutreality.substack.com
It's all a big mess, our relationship to nature.
Check out my most recently published essay, on a Substack which supplements the development of this podcast series:
https://aboutreality.substack.com/p/the-world-at-rest-as-if-comatose
Laying the groundwork of my personal being, exploring the privilege of my current living situation, which enables me to explore philosophical questions – doing this, in order to determine the direction of this podcast series. I've simplified my existence where others around me have made life so complex, precisely in order to practice philosophy.