Professor Roderick attempts to wrap up the series of lectures by "bringing it all home." That is, he wants to show how philosophy, particularly the high skepticism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century thinkers such as Nietzsche and Freud, has both helped to create and explain our modern culture.
Now, it might be easy to say, "Well, he was speaking about how things were in 1990. What does he have to say about the world of 2011?" To an extent that is a fair question. For example, Roderick was speaking about the world before "The Matrix" explored the idea that our reality is only a simulation within a machine. Roderick was speaking before we had access to the greatest museums and libraries in the palm of our hand. He was speaking before the fully realized economy of globalized, corporate hegemony. Our world today is multitudes more interconnected than that of 1990. At the time of the first war on Iraq, the U.S. military was not yet capable of bombing people on the other side of the globe from an air conditioned office building in Florida.
On the other hand, and you will see this if you listen carefully, he is describing the world we live in, in its making. The cinematic examples of "Blade Runner" or "Total Recall" describe a world dreamed about on either side of the 1980s. The one describes a world in which human consciousness can not be extinguished and (nightmare of?) immortality in the real world has been made real. While this has not yet been accomplished it is the motivating idea of Ray Kurzweil and the SIngularity project. The latter film (a Schwarzenegger joint btw), explores a world of virtual reality in which we are enabled by technology to exit the existing world of now and take a mediated journey of our own, personal, anti-social desire. While this too has not been achieved and many amongst the VR thinkers and computer scientists now think will not be possible, it is also true that we have mediated, personal, and anti-social experiences of our own making all of the time. In your pocket or on your desk is a device that is always on, always connected. We are growing accustomed to being tied to this leash if you will, or portal (portkey?) if you prefer, and these devices allow us to disconnect from the people right in front of us and virtually exit the room or the conversation, traveling out through the intertubes to watch videos of talking dogs or chat with someone on the other side of the planet. This idea is explored by MIT professor Sherry Truckle in her book "Alone Together" ( the link is to her TED Talk about her ideas.) Anyway, this is simply to say that the world 1990 is not as far removed from our current condition as one might be led to believe.
Ultimately, what Roderick is interested in is what this convergence of the global economy, high technology, our politics is doing to "The Self"; what it means to be human and whether or not its is even possible any longer.
Some of you were struggling with Kierkegaard's notion of despair. That is okay. Don't despair. Well, not until you have finished this last lecture.
AUDIO MP3 (Right click to download.)
Discussion Question:
• Why is it crucially important for Roderick to understand why the culture has begun trying to "destroy, deconstruct, or disrupt the very conditions for being human"? In what way does Freud help to illustrate the self
Lecture Eight: Philosophy and Postmodern Culture
I. A recap of the lecture series:
A. Retrace the history of the accounts of human values given in Western Philosophy, and you’ll probably find a dead end with some rather ordinary philosophic problems.
B. Hegel reminds us that human values and moral and ethical problems arise in historical circumstances.
C. Society and history has to do with economics and the state.
D. Culture is less systematic. A culture based on spectacle and images has a peculiar nonsystematic character.
II. Freud outlines the process of economic building with cultural unawareness.
A. The conscious mind is a very small part of our psychic life.
B. Freud’s goal was for the unconscious (id) to become the conscious (ego).
C. Mass culture turns the conscious to unconscious.
D. We can tune out the culture, however, we cannot destroy it.
III. Civilisation can be seen as a drama between eros (love) and thanatos (death).
A. The mechanism of one side has clearly gained the upper hand (thanatos).
1. However, eternal eros might come in and strike a blow for the other side.
2. This is about to be a global situation that will be difficult to solve because there are no concrete walls.
B. We must reinject resistance into or at least put up a simulation of resistance to it.
1. The worst thing we can do is to be unanimously for something.
2. We have not yet written the last obituary for radical democracy.
C. St. Paul’s answer is in Corinthians. It is a masterpiece of sophistry, rhetoric and bitter invective.
D. Philosophy is disconsolate in principle.
1. Hegel said dialectics or philosophy does not run from detestation but tarries with it awhile and looks it in its face.
2. The structural principles of our society are as barbaric in their structure as they ever were, perhaps more so.
