Crisis As Decision In German Thought with Timothy Schatz

Crisis didn’t always mean endless catastrophe. In German thought, it once meant a turning point—a judgment that forces choice. We dig into why that word saturated late 19th‑century philosophy and how it connected national unification, scientific ambition, and the search for values that could survive modernity’s shocks.

We start with the idealists: Kant’s “critical” epoch set the mood for Hegel’s self‑clarifying history and the historicists’ hunt for inner laws of culture. From there, we follow the political tremors—Napoleon to Bismarck, unification to Weimar—to see how crisis moved from battlefield to spirit. Nietzsche then flips the frame. With God declared dead, he treats crisis as the baseline. The “last man” laughs, while creativity becomes obligation. Whether you read eternal return as metaphysics or a test, the question remains: can you affirm life without borrowed certainties?

Enter Husserl with a different alarm. The sciences aren’t failing; they’re succeeding so thoroughly that they forget their ground. His method—the epoché and phenomenological description—recenters evidence in the lifeworld, the shared, embodied world where things show up with sense before theory. That doesn’t undercut physics or math; it anchors them. We talk through demarcation debates, the limits of positivism, and how probability and incompleteness humbled simple falsification stories. Along the way we revisit Marx’s crises as forks, not fate, and unpack how “krisis” in Greek names decision at its root.

If crisis is judgment, not doom, then it asks something of us: to test idols with Nietzsche’s courage and to pause with Husserl’s discipline before deciding what to affirm. We close with practical stakes—why method matters for public reason, how translation shapes concepts, and where philosophy still helps when hot takes run out.

Enjoy the conversation? Follow the show, share it with a friend who loves big ideas, and leave a review so more curious people can find us.

Musis by Bitterlake, Used with Permission, all rights to Bitterlake

Chapters

• 0:00 Framing “Crisis” In German Thought
• 4:37 From Kant To Hegel: Peaks And Aftermath
• 9:07 Historicism, Nation Building, And Power
• 14:28 Nietzsche’s Default Of Crisis
• 19:12 Husserl’s Scientific Crisis And The Lifeworld
• 24:47 Political Upheaval And Philosophical Stakes
• 31:27 System Building Versus Fragments
• 35:57 Cycles, Eternal Return, And Spengler
• 42:17 Language, Translation, And “Krisis”
• 47:37 Decision At The Heart Of Crisis
• 54:07 Why Husserl Still Matters
• 1:00:27 Science, Positivism, And Demarcation
• 1:07:17 Marxism, Materialism, And Structure
• 1:14:07 Old Metaphysics, New Physics
• 1:20:32 Phenomenology Before Metaphysics

Transcript

Framing “Crisis” In German Thought

Joe Payne 0:49

Hello and welcome to BarnBlogging. Today I'm talking again with Timothy Schatz, who looked different and is way older than the last time I talked to you. So you were one of the first year guests in the show. Now we're on year five. I've gained a lot of weight and grown my hair long. Actually, you've lost a lot of weight and grown your hair long. Yes. So for listeners, this will matter not at all. And I bring this, I wanted to talk to you because I find a keyword in 19th century German philosophy and political economy all over the place. And it's often talked about in very specific terms in what I do here because it's tied into economic crises, although that term is vague. And I find myself today titling every show that I have something, something crisis, something, something crisis, something, something, crisis. And I was thinking about after you messaged me privately, a couple of books I read a long time ago now. One is the the history of the crisis of reason, which is the history of late 19th century philosophy focusing primarily on German and English philosophy. And the other was the crisis of the crisis of reason, which was a rejoinder by Umberto Echo. I don't expect you to know those because I didn't tell you I was going to bring them up. But the thing that that occurred to me is that around the 19th century, particularly in German philosophy, at the end of the ideal, what we generally call the idealist period, like Schiller, Hegel, and all that stuff, you start seeing crisis come up as a philosophical term a lot, like a whole lot. And it means very, very different things. So instead of talking about, you know, the crisis of capitalism vis-a-vis the falling rates of profits and value accumulation, blah blah blah. I wanted to talk to you about like why is that term so predominant in so many different fields in 19th century Germany? And why does it show up? And German philosophers that we you know kind of linked together, such as let's say Nietzsche and Herserl, which you know you you write a lot about. But why what do you make of that term being used in so many diverse ways philosophically in Germany, you know, around the end of the 19th century?

From Kant To Hegel: Peaks And Aftermath

SPEAKER_03 3:48

Yeah. And there's kind of there's a couple of things going on there. I think for one, the one that you mentioned, you mentioned the German idealist tradition. Really get at like the end of Kant's life, his discussion and kind of theory of history. Now, I don't think I think the majority of it wasn't published, and it's in like the post-humorous writings, which are it's a bunch of volumes. I I had a a friend who was working on that when I was in my master's, where he has this like three-part history or three-part division of history, ultimate leading to this third period, which is the critical period where kind of his philosophy society and history has reached the point of the insights of Kantian philosophy. And then you kind of see that idea of reaching the not the end of history, but some sort of high point again and again in terms of the other German idealists with like Fichte and Hegel and Schelling, where we have some sort of moment of self-awareness, or we're aware of what we've been doing the whole time. And so now we can do something, maybe. You know, I feel like it always tends to the the next step never seems quite clear in most of these philosophies. And in Hegel, that seems to be somewhat intentional. I think Schelling wanted to say something afterwards, but never could. And I don't know Fippe well enough to say more on that. At the same time, there's the kind of German historicist tradition that's happening. I largely influenced, I think, by Herder and kind of following what's going on through the 19th century and trying to say, like, well, say, like, what was it? Like, in terms of trying to figure out like the rules or the laws that are undergirding society, there often become a moment of needing to like affirm what's happening without necessarily being knowing if you should affirm it or not. And so you get like a reaction to say Napoleon, Bismarck, all these things where it's like, what's the thing to do? Let's affirm the thing, or this is somehow a concrete instantiation of the laws of history. And so these things are developing, I think, more and more throughout the 19th century. And are, I don't know, I'd say kind of shaping a lot of the environment or the mil the kind of intellectual milieu of Germany. Because you get this comment, you obviously, you know, you mentioned Nietzsche, where we have, you know, the death of God, and so there's having to reval come up with new values, finally the Christian revaluation of the ancients has fallen apart, and now there seems to be something new. And we find this moment where we need to create something, kind of similar. There's also like you have Oswald Spengler, where we talk about some sort of crisis moment. And then throughout just in Housserl and Heidegger, or at least the young Heidegger, the younger Heidegger, you get that discussion of there's a crisis, we need to act, or this is the moment of creation. That somehow, you know, there's the the line that Heidegger cites from from Holderlin, which is like wherever the danger grows, there the saving power lays lies. Forget the German off the top of my head. So it's kind of like a yeah, that's my attempt to kind of to try to say why it's happening, but it really is a big kind of just in really is the intellectual milieu of the time. And it seems to, I think, to materially speaking, connect to the crises that are happening to Germany and also the formation of Germany. And you get kind of this recurring question of what does it mean to be German? What is Germany? And thinking of like the Hendrik Heine quote poem about Lorelee and there's the danger and the invention and all of that. So you just kind of get something, it seems like every couple of years throughout that long time period. I mean, that was a lot, but that's my initial well.

Historicism, Nation Building, And Power

Joe Payne 7:41

I think that that narrative of idealist successor to the enlightenment, German counter-Enlightenment around Herder, and then the German historical tradition is a little bit too simple and so simple enough to be confused. But it does seem very interesting to me that German identity has a crisis philosophically at the very moment it can actually exist as a political reality. Because that's that's the other thing I think people don't tend to like think about this because we think about German philosophy in terms of you know Germany as a culture and the uh German tradition that goes back a while, but Germany as a state and German culture as a unified culture, not just as a bunch of cultures that's that just happen to speak related dialects of a language, is a relatively new phenomenon when this crisis period is happening. In fact, one would argue maybe not has fully happened yet. So what what do you think is driving you know this? Because the other thing I think that we have to like also deal with for me, I remember reading Frederick Besser Besser's book on after Hegel, where you realize that like the German philosophical systems in in the Prussian period under Bismarck and in the Second Reich really do have to come up with a practical justification of themselves. So philosophy tries to like have a reason to exist in terms of what it of some kind of use to the functional state and to and to markets and to the military, which is also not something that we we you know we don't think about, but like this is not something that the the early idealists were necessarily as concerned with as later people who come in the middle of the 19th century. Does that play into why this idea of crisis becomes so predominant in in German philosophy?

SPEAKER_03 9:58

It's a really tempting answer to say yes, but I don't I don't I I wish I knew more about the specific the specific relationship between philosophy and the state of that time period. I don't know. Look, I I think that it matters that in general Europe is going through Germany's been created, it's gotta justify itself, it's gotta figure out how to kind of meld all these different cultures together. You have the uh the various I mean just village to village can be largely different, but trying to weld all these countries together and then how do you have a how do you have a coherent, a coherent set of values? You have the Catholic versus Protestant tensions, and ultimately like the mountain and like lowland German, I don't know, unity never managed, it never seemed to really come about. You know, there's still there was always a division between Austria and Germany, for example. But I think I think in terms but at the same time, and just thinking about like thinking of a specific figure here, I'm like Husserl at the same time as seeing a crisis happen on the in the sciences and philosophy in general, but he's he's really concerned with kind of the that natural science has been very successful. It's been it's proven to be a very helpful way of understanding the world. And yet that success has largely largely blinded it to some underlying problems, namely that you know it can kind of fit in some of the general general critiques of like only looking at quantity, you know, only looking at quantification of mathematical ideals and not talking about values as much. But for him, it's more that the scientific method requires such a complete putting aside of the subjective side of things that it's really lost touch with like the source of its insights. And so ultimately he'll want to talk about the you know, the life world, the Leibenswelt, as he calls it, which is this more it's what's prior. It's it's a very it's somewhat underdeveloped just because he comes up with this in the 30s, and that's also when he gets banned from teaching and then dies at the end of the 30s. But more or less we're talking about the embodied perceptual world, which is a mix of habits and expectations and time and all of these things. And there may, but really before there's an explicit judgment that's been brought about. So I'm living my life in a little bit more of a passive way, and then I can make a judgment. I can say, make a claim about, oh, there's a this case of a glass sitting to my right, and then what would I need to do to actually verify it? And the source of how I would verify it comes from the passive side of things, or that if I were able to verify that this is a cup or to describe the cup, it would come from my kind of pre-theoretic or my pre-predicative experience or pre-theoretical experience. But he doesn't want to just go in this, it's whatever your experience does. He wants to kind of have this balance between the objective, or I'd say, like the necessary, and then also these more subjective aspects. Wants to have both.

Nietzsche’s Default Of Crisis

Joe Payne 13:14

So we have a crisis in the sciences, and science in the 19th century Germany means a lot of things to more than more than what we would mean by it. But the natural sciences would be pretty much what we would mean by science today. And it seems like this comes out of a turbulent period of philosophical thinking, where you know, you see the rise and fall of the German historical school, you have the development of both philosophical and political Marxism, you have the German roots of existentialism, although it jumps over the France primarily after Heidegger. You you know, we you go through two, you know, well, three really major. I mean, if you think about Hrostwell's right uh life, he's he sees the end of the Second Reich, aka the United Germany, the establishment of the Weimar Republic, and its fall. That does seem pretty perilous to have gone through three governments and I don't know, less than I mean, three well, and when we say three governments, it's not like oh, we elected one in and it just changed. I mean, we're talking about completely different orders of government in maybe two and a half generations, like not long, it's it's very fast. So I mean, I find this so fascinating, and to tie it into history and perception, maybe a little bit and stick to your specialty because I tend to be uh obnoxiously historical about everything, but their hustle seems to be kind of one of these last major thinkers of crisis. If I look at where we first start seeing this at the end of the idealist period, and I guess we could see Herter and Marx as two different responses to this. When we get to Hustler, I think we're seeing kind of the end of this train of thought, or kinda. I mean, in so much that you can talk about it because then you get in the Frankfurt School and all and and all that, and that's a whole different can of worms, of which crisis is also major, but it's pulling from an explicit Marxist tradition, so you can figure that out. You seem to pivot Nietzsche as like this interesting transitional figure where crisis is actually super important, but it has a much broader sense than the way that we talk about it in Marxism or the way that we talk about it with Herserl.

SPEAKER_03 15:45

Yeah, I I think like I think that one can read, you know, someone like Hegel as kind of portraying history as a series of crises. But I really think that it's more Nietzsche, where we get the sense where crisis is kind of the default, especially when you get into the later, the later like monadology stuff. And you have this idea of like you have the suffering and then these new ideas arise, but there's going to be an ultimate end to everything. And so you get the cyclicality or that there's a kind of necessary end to everything already. And so you're kind of going through that process. So that makes it sound a bit more like spangler than I really mean it to, but I think that's important. I don't know. Because then it seems like connected to this is this the the desire to remake something. And so all of a sudden it seems like we have this okay, thing dying, new thing needs to be born. And that, you know, I I feel like you've heard I who's it, the the mon, you know, now is the time of monsters with Gramsci.

Joe Payne 16:44

Yeah, it's all Gramsci, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 16:46

But but but but that very much that spirit seems to, I think, I believe that really does come out of Nietzsche. And that really gets taken forth, I think, through the into the 20th century, through like the uh the life philosophers to have like I'm Heidegger's like associated with them, but I'm Diltai, I'm forgetting the names off the top of my head. But the people who are not the Neo-Kantians and the Neocantians like Cassier really didn't like. I think I'm getting caught into the history, getting kind of pulled off into that. But just to reaffirm, yeah, I I think there's something about the way that Nietzsche is really framing things where the crisis is not only just a recent event, but is ultimately kind of becomes the the horizon of understanding, experience, and maybe everything. Is that crisis is the default, or that they have a maybe a cycle of crisis, but that that's really the kind of highest standpoint from where you can understand any particular matter. Really kind of connected to certain in his case, kind of this biological sense of you know, the child, the adult, and then into the old man, then dying.

Husserl’s Scientific Crisis And The Lifeworld

Joe Payne 17:54

So Crisis for Nietzsche is, I think, you know most thoroughly obvious in the parable in Sarathuthra about the death of God and the fool and the last man who's also a fool laughing in the marketplace, which I've always found fascinating because it it showed this whether or not you consider Nietzsche to be cleanly reactionary. He's it showed that the the the response to capitalism in the German experience was negative kind of on all strains of society. I mean, surely somebody liked it, but like in general, it was perceived by these iconoclassic figures like Nietzsche as a problem, it was perceived by the old Prussian conservatives as a problem, it was perceived by the socialists as a problem. So, you know, you read the German historical school, and I here I mean the the the historical economist, particularly of the older German historical school, they view it as a problem. It's even a problem for liberals like Max Weber. So it's it's it's uh it's this thing that thrusts itself upon history, but the other thing that you you get with Nietzsche, and I you know, if I as I have Berlinist who believed, you also get it with Herder and a lot of the other sort of counter alignment German figures, is a refusal to systematize any of this, you know. And they you know, the life philosophers seem to stand apart in that tradition, apart from the neocantians who, with the mild exception of Sopenhauer, which people forget is a neocontin', but he's super neocontin' actually they're system builders, you know, as were the Hegelians, as are the Marxists. So how does the pushback on on systemic thinking play into this this thought about crisis? And both maybe Holtral Holserl and Nietzsche.

SPEAKER_03 20:25

Yeah, I'm not quite sure how Nietzsche because it's like I think that what is it, the last work that we that he was gonna write that was supposed to be more the m his more systematic works didn't get completed when he went and sang it and died. So it's hard to be like, okay, what was his, you know, what what what is his position on the system? Because he does seem to be working towards a metaphysics at the you know, the will to power, those notebooks. And the transvaluation of all values do seem to be working towards some sort of metaphysical claims. I think it's like in in Eugen Fink's book on Nietzsche, you get kind of less of fragments in the sense of there's no system. And it's really like you get a bunch of attempts to build a system in a kind of fragmentary way, but there's some sort of system and then kind of hopping from thing to thing, where it's kind of a connection with art and in the early stuff with the birth of tragedy, and then kind of moving on to different renditions of kind of a similar need for rebirth over and over again. So I mean if we want to look for like, okay, what's the response to crisis in that? It kind of almost seems like you have to remake the system. That somehow it's like you need to actually just burn it all down in kind of a mythic poetic way. Like there has to be God or Damarung, and then everything's dead, and then something new can come out of it.

Political Upheaval And Philosophical Stakes

Joe Payne 21:45

It is interesting how many of these ideas rhyme, though. I mean, you had me thinking like when you're talking about like burning it all down and having a twilight of the gods, taking your little tuning fork of a hammer, hitting the idols and then smashing them, all this Nietzschean transvaluation stuff. Is fascinating when you also think about like Schoppinter and late German, late late German historical school slash Austrian intermixing to produce his thinking about creative destruction. This idea of uh in the Marxist tradition, this idea of business cycles that are destructive but re but actually end up reinvigorating capital as one of the Marxist interpretations of why crisis isn't terminal. And I find it's interesting because these ideas seem to be swimming all over Findicla Europe, but particularly Findicla Germany. Um and I find that you know what what to make of it. I I'm glad you point out that the that maybe Walter Kaufman's reading of Nietzsche, that he's anti-systemic, is motivated, um to say the least. Although there were conservative readers of Nietzsche who did read him that way too, like uh uh Gomez de Villa, the the the Latin American reactionary thinker who wrote in like I mean he was a Catholic and a platinist, but wrote in deliberately mimicking Nietzsche and aphorisms, the eskewed, easy systemization. And so, you know, the you have that paradox in Nietzsche because you do have. I mean, I always find Nietzsche fascinating because I feel like you get hints of a larger meaning, and no, it know it's not all just aphorism, the aphorism is completely unconnected, but you only get hints, you don't really get you know, you get some concepts, you you can you have to wonder if he meant them literally. I mean, my favorite one's the eternal return. It's like, okay, does he mean that we're physically gonna just repeat history over and over again or not? Everybody reads this metaphorically, but I don't know that we actually have a good reason to read it metaphorically, like maybe we should read it literally. Go ahead.

SPEAKER_03 24:12

Yeah, no, I I mean, like, I think it's worth keeping in mind, like the ancients here. I just think like the Cretus and like the Epicureans, where like I think my friend, I have a friend who really knows this this stuff well, but there's like the three infinities, and so like in Epicurean thought, it's like, well, if you got multiple X, you know, it's infinite time, everything is always happening everywhere, and everything has always happened, every version of it all the time. And that's like the Adamist way of handling kind of the like of why this world and not another world. It's like, well, they all are. You know, it's like almost like if you think like the quantum, like the Copenhagen, it's like multiple worlds. That's like, oh yeah, just everything is. And everything in each one This has occurred to us before. Yes, right. So it might not be it's insane to say that Nietzsche would think something like this, or at least suggest it. I mean, you even get like certain cyclicalities going on in like Aristotelian thought with his like account of history of these destruction and similar things in in Plato and the Neoplatonic, yeah. This then even epistemologically with the rise up the ladder and then the fall back down the ladder or ascent towards the one, and then eventually the descent of the soul. So that that kind of eternal, yeah, that that repetition is very much an old idea, and anything is probably one of the historical defaults.

Joe Payne 25:39

Well, I mean, yeah, I mean, the the joke is man invents a technology and tries to explain all of history by it, the will comes first. So but um uh I I do actually, I mean, I do think like you deal with ancient thinking, cyclic thinking of of like entropy cycles and whatnot, or what we would call entropy cycles and re and rebirth cycles, and then in history literally going through set turnings of a wheel, like you see this thinking all over at least the Indo-European world. You see it in Dharmic thinkers, you see it in you see it in the ancient Near East. I mean, really the the the places that the only places that kind of don't do it are the Abrahamic tradition and the Persian traditions, who have apocalyptic ways of thinking that are linear, but most everybody else is on a cycle. And that that themes comes up a lot in in 19th century German philosophy. I mean, I'm thinking of Spingler and Nietzsche here, but also you know, like uh Nietzsche maybe quite literally, but Spingler is like life cycles of civilizations are based on a biological notion of life cycles. I mean, it's like the the the death of the West is because the West is in a decadent phase, it's gotta die, but something's gonna emerge after it. It's not, you know, it it's not apocalyptic, it's more just oh this culture's run its cycle and it's gonna do something else now. Although I do find this pessimism really funny in light of what we just said, still, that like in the case of Germany, German unified German culture is really still kind of new, you know, at least this iteration of it. Because while the Germans themselves are tempted to see the Holy Roman Empire as you know German, we really shouldn't actually do that. Like it it spoke a German language sporadically, kind of.

SPEAKER_03 27:56

Um yeah, I don't know how many hundreds of different German languages there are. It's like Switzerland, probably more comparable to Switzerland in terms of like language diversity back then.

Joe Payne 28:08

Oh yeah. Well, I mean, the there is no standard German until Lucer's translation of the Bible into the Gutenberg Bible, and even that doesn't become truly standard for like 200 years, and it it it isn't standard, it doesn't dictate spoken German. So, like um it, you know, I was reading a history on on the German language just because you know I'm interested in all these German philosophers, and I really got interested actually for a while and like trying to figure out all the puns in Hegel. Calling them puns makes people think they're funny, but I'm like, no, almost every single term in Swabian dialect German has two damn meanings, and he means both of them, and it's madness.

SPEAKER_03 29:02

Yeah, I've been hearing you talk about that one for years. Just like I'm I'm like I have a copy, but I it's like the standardized German version. Like, yeah, I I've spent the time learning, I've spent a lot of time learning German. I feel comfortable reading, but when it comes to speaking, it's like all right, it happened to have worked out. If not, you know, you just kind of have to kind of out of luck and hopefully English works.

System Building Versus Fragments

Joe Payne 29:27

Yeah, yeah. Well, me, me, I did speak German okay uh 20 years ago, and today I can't even like I people are like like I'll screw up and say Nietzsche because I'm lazy, and people will freak out like I don't know anything. But I really have lost my ability to like quickly form German sentences beyond like very simple sentences in the most anglified sounding German you've ever heard, but I can still read it fine. I don't like it's kind of confusing, and and I find this I mean, I do find this interesting for dealing with a lot of these philosophers because I remember when I first approached Heidegger and Nietzsche, and I don't think it's as important in Nietzsche, but like until I started looking at the literal meanings of the words in German, not in the weird English it was translated into with some German not translated, did some of it kind of sorta, and I only mean kind of sorta start making sense to me. Whereas like Marx there are some things where we can play on like the specific vagaries of German, like does Marx mean natural science when he talks about socialism as a science? No, but not far from it, like you know, so you can play those games if you want to, but with with crisis, it's kind of interesting. So, one of things I was gonna ask you in the German, because I haven't read Herserl in German, so I really don't know, and I haven't read Nietzsche in German in over 20 years, because why would I do that to myself? Now, actually, he is very readable in German, but that's not my point. It's not like reading Hegel in any language ever. Is crisis even the same term? What's the term being used for crisis? What does it literally mean? Like, is there an etymology that would help us understand maybe what this like why this term became so ubiquitous?

SPEAKER_03 31:46

Yeah, because like as far as I'm aware, in Husserl it's just der Krisis. So it's just crisis, just crisis, same word as English, so you know, just with a K because it's German. Yeah, I'm curious what is the I'm curious what'll come up. I know I don't know of any, yeah, off the top of my head. Let me I'm curious though. This might be uninteresting. It seems to have been borrowed from the Latin word crisis, and then that goes to the Greek crisis as a separating, a power of distinguishing, decision, choice, election, judgment, dispute. And that one just keeps going back to a modification of I is it curino? Plus which plus the add the ending that I think makes it into a noun, which is I decide. And then seem to hit related to separating to sift, separate I discern, I separate, kind of related to these words here.

Joe Payne 33:07

Well, the decision part of that is actually not really in the English connotation of crisis for us. Crisis implies long drawn out catastrophe. Yeah, yeah, that's for sure. Well, so I mean, how much is that decision element of it in the German?

Cycles, Eternal Return, And Spengler

SPEAKER_03 33:28

I say as as you, a philosopher, not a philologist, but I I would say I will speak to Husserl, or and I think it's very much there. Like soul is like, okay, there's a crisis, maybe in a long-term sense, and they, you know, there's a crisis that's been going on for a long time. But I for Husserl, there's constantly, you know, it's methodologically, there's always this capacity to make a decision, to enact what he will, you know, do the phenomenological method. Essentially, there's always this ability, you know, the to take the, you know, to pause and to reflect on what you're doing. That's a necessary possibility that that we always have. And it's particularly that if you really take reflection seriously, if you follow it to the end, then ideally speaking, not in the sense of like you're actually going to do it, but in the like mathematical sense of a limit, you can kind of approach understanding what you've been doing so that I guess ideally there can be a change, you can bring about a change and then not be doing the same thing, that there can be a reformation of culture and the sciences that can be brought about through phenomenology. Now how that looks, I mean, part of the problem is that Husserl is talking about this the whole time, and then it gets kind of turned up higher and higher as the, you know, as it goes to the 20s and then to the 30s, especially, and then he dies. So, in terms of like what that's actually supposed to look like, I don't know. It's it's difficult because he doesn't say that you know the uh the phenomenologist or the philosopher should go around and like telling people what to do. He comes from the you know, he c he comes from the tradition, I think was it like science first or mathematics first perspective. He also talks a lot about mathematics, which is also going through a crisis all throughout this time as well, kind of culminating like the girdling completeness theorems and other things in the 20s. But that by people, scientists, culture are doing things, and then phenomenology can do its descriptive work to understand what they're doing. There's a word, he'll use the word like bezingung in the 20s and 30s. It's like a sense investigation trying to understand the presuppositions of a of a science or any sort of activity, any sort of like way of life. But he also seems to have this idea. I think it's connected to some of the stuff he was doing on ficta, but I'm not 100% sure, about well, if everyone, if we can do phenomenology, and more people do phenomenology, that somehow there can be a change that's brought about. Maybe not in the sense he's I don't think he's saying, I don't think he's maintaining the idea that everybody has to become a phenomenologist, but I think he's hoping that through it being done, this attempt to you know return to the things themselves, to just actually do follow through on that reflection and bring out all of the presuppositions of what you're doing or what a a group of people are doing, then somehow because it's been made explicit, that the a change can be brought about. Because for him, the crises really seem to stem from the fact that we're we're blind to what we're doing. And that way it's maybe a bit more kind of maybe that way it's a bit more platonic. It's there's something that's in the way, but if we could get rid of the thing that's in the way, which is really just our blindness, then then change could come about. And so a lot of the not entirely, but I think a lot of the kind of prescriptive or if there's going to be a prescriptive aspect to this, it would be in kind of what he'll say, the epoch of, you know, the suspending judgment, taking a moment, taking that time then to examine to examine your object neutrally instead of just neutrally by letting kind of using the terms that it presents itself to you as to in to describe it. And so that way you've somehow you're not going to just bring in what other people have told you is the case. And so that way you can forestall just saying, well, you know, science has always said that this is the way things are. So I'm just going to say that that's the object is according to what science has said. It's like, no, let's see how it is. And then somehow, then you can be like, oh, well, this seems to be the more genuine view, or this has been kind of evidence, there's evidence for it. It's been evidenced through the phenomenological method versus the versus the scientific claims. Not saying he's not saying that they don't have any validity, but that when you just have received truths, you've received opinions. You know, there might be reputable opinions, but they're still just opinions. You do need to do the work to find you to actually like prove things or to he'll use the best translation is evidence, and it's kind of an awkward word in English, but you know, you have to recreate the evidence that the other person did, uh you have to recreate the evidence that the scient that the scientist was encountering when they made the judgment in order to actually be able to prove it to be able to corroborate it or not. I think that's a fairly like standard way of going about things. I don't think that that's particularly new, but he really does want to emphasize on this and just keep coming back to it again and again. And then this connects to the life world and it gets into a very complicated description of just mental or subjective life and bodied life and all the different ways that whenever you look up phenomenology, it's always phenomenology in something.

Language, Translation, And “Krisis”

Joe Payne 39:06

Well, I mean, this does kind of get to an interesting connotation of why crisis would be implicated in the 19th century philosophy so much, because it would be in this formation of national identity and of the response to developments in broader Europe, it would be a sense of where do you where where are these people going to choose to go when these old systems are melting away, and they really were melting away. I mean, that's that like that that is pretty clearly not just a metaphor. So, you know, although I I do wonder, I was like, how if I think about this decision element of crisis, like given the way Marxists talk about it deterministically, I wonder I'd have to go back and reread Marx and wonder if that decision that that decision implication is actually maybe in there too. I need to actually go back and reread the original, probably in German to really check. That's an interesting implication, yeah. So, you know, how you know Herserl Husserl's interesting because I think he's a vital philosopher who unfortunately gets taught to most people as a footnote to later and earlier existentialism. You know, like when you learn Nietzsche, you're like, and there's this guy Herserl. He came before Heidegger. Right. Don't don't you really care about Heidegger? Like or you're studying Camelin's author and the French existentialist. And like, yeah, they're preceded by Husserl, he's the link to Nietzsche. Isn't that cool? Have a nice day. I mean, I was kind of literally taught Husserl this way as an undergraduate student in philosophy in the late 90s, early aughts. So I guess this does lead me to ask you, like why should we look at Hersterl as a trans as an interesting transitional figure in in German philosophy, as of it in and of itself, the way we look at Nietzsche, but the way we maybe don't look at like I don't know, half of the Neo-Kantians that I've forgotten about that I read in the book once are some of the other life philosophers. Again, I've forgotten about because they got mentioned because they were associated with Higer. Or Adorno wrote a nasty book about them, you know, those kind of things. Like, so like, why should we care? Timothy?

SPEAKER_03 41:46

Yeah, no, that's a good sorry, that's a good question. Because he really I like the way that you're putting that. Because he really is like, you know, of like the three, I don't know, the main move, the main three movements in philosophy in the 20th century, you have the one that people always forget about, which are the neotomists who are just mostly arguing amongst themselves and in Catholic schools. Then you have analytic philosophy, and then you have this kind of continental, then you have continental philosophy. Who throws at the root of continental philosophy? And he's also really kind of at the root of the analytic continental split as well, because that happens around Frega and then kind of splits around it's just kind of splitting around the rise of phenomenology. Like I remember, oh, I'm forgetting his name off the top of my head, but one of the Vienna S Circle guys knew Heidegger's work quite well, but he's like, well, this nothing, nothing's business is not is grammatically nonsense, so we need to dismiss it. I would say I I think though I think the reason why we should care is that I I'll just kind of take Sartre's phrase here because I think it was quite good, where it's like he was given he was like sitting at the this, you know, the the story, he's like sitting at the cafe, someone brings him a cop, you know, had come back from Germany, is like, I've been reading Husserl. You can make philosophy out of you know this apricot cocktail that you're drinking. And that book of what was it, the existentialist cafe or something like that, I think was written kind of based around that around that aphorism.

Joe Payne 43:14

Uh it's an unfortunate book, but go ahead.

SPEAKER_03 43:17

Yeah. The point being is that I think unlike Nietzsche, where we get kind of this aesthetics of newness, you know, it kind of I think even in Deleuze, and kind of in these like later 20th century, there's kind of the aesthetics of newness. I think that Hoosterl actually is trying to take seriously or sorry, sense of newness and like over these people, that sense of newness and like, oh, we're actually touching things, we're actually in contact with life and in with things, we're not caught in abstractions. I think Hoosterl, for all of its prose, which can be very, you know, dry and very difficult to understand, actually comes up with a method, and a method comes up with a 40-year-long methodological reflection on how you could actually do that very much concretely in a way that doesn't turn into poetry. Like I think that Housterl offers kind of, you can both have your scientific perspective and you can also have be like being alive in the world, and you don't need to separate the the two. There is actually, I think, a proper kind of mingling of the ideal and the material and the real there. Where I think a lot of 20th century philosophy is kind of those two things coming unraveled for various reasons. But but in Husserl, I think that there's a genuine attempt to there's a genuine attempt to just kind of try again and being willing to try over and over again and kind of making a virtue out of that without it becoming, I don't, without it becoming pessimistic. Like that's one thing that I think that's worth that's remarkable about Husteral is that despite the fact that, yeah, living through this, that time period, you know, through, you know, he was born in what, 59 in like uh Prague. So we have what the Austro-Prussian War, the founding of Germany into World War One, into Weimar, into the rise of the Nazis, and then died before I think in 38. I think it was 38. So things were happening. I forget what exactly Hitler was doing at the time. Like World War II hadn't started, but things were going in that direction at that point. But again, there was still there was still this insistence where let's not he never said let's stop. It's not worthwhile to it's he never wanted to give up on thinking and didn't want to give up on that we could actually achieve truth and that we could have the truth, you know, that we we could continue to strive for the truth in a way that wasn't meaningless. And that's for me the thing that really, really connect really I really connect with. Because like my, you know, part of the reason I got into philosophy is I I thought I was gonna go into well, I thought I was gonna go into psychology when I was like at the end of high school because I was I don't know. And then I ended up like at that time the replication crisis started happening. And so I was like, hang on, there's a methodological problem here. I want something a little bit more rigorous. Ultimately went to math and then discovered the incompleteness theorems and spent time studying that, and then ended up reading philosophy with you know a bunch of continental phenomenology people and others, and then just have kind of continued to do that.

Joe Payne 46:28

It's funny that you say that though, because in a way you actually mirror Husserl's academic career.

SPEAKER_03 46:36

I noticed this, and this is unintentional, but it is very funny.

SPEAKER_02 46:39

It's like you get the mathematics, the psychology, and then the phenomenon.

Joe Payne 46:43

Yeah, because you know, he's tied to Brittano, not to be confused with the historical two Brittano, but the other Brittano.

Decision At The Heart Of Crisis

SPEAKER_03 46:49

Other Brittano? I only know the word, I know the Franz Briton Brentano.

Joe Payne 46:54

Yeah, Franz Britano is his teacher. Yeah, there's a Britano uh associated with the historical school, I believe. And I've been trying to make sure that they were not the same person for a long time. One of them's an ex-priest. I think that's the Austrian ex-priest.

SPEAKER_01 47:12

I think he's Austrian.

Joe Payne 47:13

Yeah, he's Austrian. And he's you know, he he was he was associated with a bunch of people, including Sigmund Freud, but also Herserel. I think those are the two most famous of his students to English speakers, although Carl Stunt is actually really important too. But I find this interesting because one of the things that's really fascinating about reading German, any German academic from the end of the 19th century, is academic fields outside of like philology and math are super porous, like in ways that are not true in the English university at the same time. So, for example, like you have people going from like math and the philosophy, you have people going from philosophy and the political economy all the time. You have stuff like the German historical school, which is technically economics, but like, well, one of the German historical schools is technically economics. That's another confusing thing because two of them. But to us, reads like sociology and is actually kind of accepted as the foundations of modern sociology, not economics, which I actually think says something about the hostility between those two fields today. As in, one whole field of economics got turned into got got got subsumed into French and English sociology so that we could understand it. And I I find this interesting because it's just clear to me when you try to explain a figure like Hersserl or Marx or Nietzsche. I mean, Nietzsche is actually pretty explainable. He's a philologist and he's a weird one. You know, I mean, basically his dissertation is a troll. For those of you who don't know the birth of tragedy, just remember that's supposed to be a philologist dissertation, not uh not a screed about aesthetics, which is basically what it is Wagner and writing music at the same time. Yeah, I mean, autodidact nerd shit, but it is interesting to think about this. I mean, you you know many German philosophers that we know of when we think of like the biggest names in German philosophy, they weren't actually only trained or primarily trained in German philosophy. I mean, Karl Marx is all over the place, he was trained as a philosopher and he hated philosophy. I mean, like his dissertation is a Hegelian reading of Epicureanism, and I don't know that it's all available. I've actually, I know that they've finally posted fragments of it somewhere. I actually, it's one of the few things I haven't read by Marx. That and me trying to read his mathematical notebooks, which are just bizarre. It looks like he's trying to work out calculus, but it's just not very good at math.

SPEAKER_03 50:08

I mean, there's also Hegel's like 40-page footnote on calculus in the science of logic. So he's in he's in the tradition of writing like insane stuff on math in that case.

Joe Payne 50:19

Yeah, yeah, it's fun. There's a lot of weird stuff in the science of logic that I know a lot of like Marxian science of logic fans just skip because we're just like we don't want to touch that, or are like when people try to convince me that Hegel was a secret atheist, and like I don't know, man. The the the the the notes in the history of religion are not, I mean, unless you think that's all fake, like but Harseryl's interesting for a variety of reasons because phenomenology is. I mean, I think we forget this, but it it there's a reason why it's so tied to existentialism, but it also is an attempt to like deal with what we would now call in like English thick description embridge psychology, history, and flo and mathematical philosophy to deal with the limits of each one of those separately. I mean, that's like what Hercerl is really trying to do, and I think it's if we lean in on crisis as a point of decision, it does seem like Hercerl's challenge is like we have to decide what to do with all this stuff that we can't quantify in science because there seems to be a lot of stuff that we you know deal with that are that we only deal with because we can deal with it in math. Or as my favorite thing, there's entire metaphysical constructs like I don't know, brain theory that's B-R-A-N-E theory, that exist because the mathematics demands it, but I'm also like, well, the mathematic the mathematics also demanded ether until we until we mathematically figured out dark matter. And when I say mathematically figured out dark matter, actually the evidence we have from dark matter doesn't actually doesn't seem to match the math of dark matter. So there is a way in which the concerns of someone like Cursor have actually been pretty well justified in the second half of the 20th century. And I I I guess one of my last questions to you, and I'm people should know I'm a plan on having you back on the show. We'll plan out maybe a more specific topic, but about this idea of the way a lot of 19th century German philosophies come back, Marx, but also like people trying to revindicate Freud for the like fifth time, and you know, this, that, and the other. I could probably guilty of that one. I mean, look, I like Freud as long as you're not telling me it's how the brain actually works.

SPEAKER_01 53:06

Okay, okay, yeah, yeah.

Joe Payne 53:08

As like speculative, especulative philosophical psychology. I'm down. You try to tell me that the brain actually has a death drive, and I start laughing at your face.

Why Husserl Still Matters

SPEAKER_03 53:18

Okay, but have you ever read a book called Spinal Catastrophism? Yes, like it's sorry, I was just like in terms of the wild speculative biology stuff, yeah.

Joe Payne 53:27

No, yes, yeah. Uh also every now and then people try to try to bring back vitalism without realizing how bizarrely mystical it is.

SPEAKER_03 53:38

Yeah, process philosophy people that pop up every once in a while. It's like, yeah, I don't know if Whitehead really works in the way that you want him to.

Joe Payne 53:46

Um yeah, whitehead, Berkson, even delusion guitar re. I'm like, there's some there's some metaphysical assumptions you're not admitting right here. Like, but anyway, it is interesting because it does seem like the second half of the 20th century vindicates that skepticism in some ways, and then what we've seen with a lot of people discussing science and philosophy today, I actually think is a backtracking of not just against postmodernism, aka post-structuralism. I must put postmodernism in quotations because it's like modernism so damn broad that I don't know what it means, and it means different things in different fields, and people use it as a scare word and a slur.

SPEAKER_03 54:32

Yeah, post-structuralist. We got Foucault, Derrida, a couple of other people, but at least kind of centered directly.

Joe Payne 54:39

Yeah, we know who we're talking about when we're talking about post-structuralists, and then like post-Marxist, we we you know, I uh you've got Leotard and Baudrillard who are related to the post-structuralist, have similar assumptions, but aren't can't quite be said to be the same thing. They drank coffee in the same room, yeah. They were all rock stars out of Saban, but crazy stories about that. Yeah, but you know, I I I find today what we've had amongst radical intellectuals is actually an attempt to go back to 19th century definitions of science that I don't think you can be informed about science and actually do.

SPEAKER_03 55:24

Yeah, what are you noticing specifically?

Joe Payne 55:26

Because I I think I I I've seen attempts to resurrect positivism as if the positivists themselves did not because people like I'm like, no, the impressive thing about the positivists and actually do everyone's like, oh, they were disproven by history. I'm like, no, I mean they were, but they disproved themselves. Like it wasn't another group that disproved them, they actually realized that their project wasn't viable. You see a lot of returning to popper whenever people are uncomfortable, and like falsification. I'm like, falsification is basically more or less disproven if you think about probability for 30 seconds, like there's no way to falsify anything.

SPEAKER_03 56:09

Like, yeah, there's never the all-extreme cases where like it turns out that it's just a range to the way where it's actually the thing, but you didn't realize it for some other reason, right?

Joe Payne 56:21

And so if you read someone like Masumo Pegliushi, who unfortunately just started doing pop stoicism, I guess because his actual research problem was too hard. And I say this, I like Masumo Pegliucci's work, but who like pointed out that, like, yeah, we kind of know what pseudoscience is, but we actually don't know what science is, and there is no demarcation line. And saying stuff like Elaine Sokol did that science is as rigorous, common sense is like transparently bullshit. Like and Hosarell, I think, gets to that problem really early. Oh, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 56:55

It's like you get to the his first book or his second dissertation, his first dissertation is on calculus and like the foundation, but the second one's about mathematics and arithmetic, and it's trying to ground these like these mathematical things, these mathematical concepts. You do get the like for him, where it's like, okay, we seem to have kind of following, kind of like Aristotle, of the sciences seem to be dealing with a region of being. And it really becomes a question of how is that region of being constituted within the science. So you have what is nature? Okay, physics is studying nature or studying, you know, the physical, but really becomes a question of like, okay, if you want to understand what that is, it's about how is the the idea of the physical constituted within the community of the science of the scientists, not just as the immediate group, but also as a tradition. So it becomes very much kind of moving, evolving idea. And you get you can see why the hermeneutical concerns kind of show up pretty quickly here, but it's not just talking about yeah, it we're not for him, it's not just interpreting what they're doing, that there is an actual like insights into the essence of human activities that are actually happening there, ultimately.

Joe Payne 58:03

Right, it's not just sociology masquerading as philosophy, like yes, um it has to do with transcendental things, which we can save for another time, right? Exactly. That's a that's a bit that's a big one. I think about this in terms of Marxism. I mean, like, because you've seen a lot of Marx just try to resurrect 19th century notions of science, which are almost positivistic. And I'm always pointing out pointing out that like Marx himself is inconsistent on that because he actually realizes the problem of positivistic science, but he's also really attracted to it because it makes making clear claims really fun. Um so it's I shouldn't be that simple. I send like I'm dismissing Marx, but like I actually do think it's a it's a problem in Marxism, but it's one they're well aware of because they actually do admit that philosophy and science is situated in this historical, you know, not just papisteam, like like the post-structuralist, but like in a historical mode of production and a set of relations that that make getting to true essences impossible, but it doesn't mean they're not there.

SPEAKER_03 59:07

It's like you get a glimpse of it. The fact that you can say something is wrong means you somehow have had an insight into what's true, right? You just can't say it, you don't have contact.

Science, Positivism, And Demarcation

Joe Payne 59:18

Bingo, so they're trying to work out science, you know, like but they I even a marks you get a grasping with the problems of it, and it leads to like these controversies about materialism that like Lenin's famously and my least favorite work by Lenin, honestly, monism and imperial criticism. But but Lenin does have a point in that, like Marxist materialism may or may not be monistic, and like it may only assume like material substances, although I'm not sure you can. But for Marxism, materialism is also structures, and that goes all the way back to his study of Epicurus and Epicurus's materialism is structural as well as like substance. I mean, substance monasist. I have so much trouble articulating this in English, but like the universe is made of matter, matters one thing, right? But there's only one kind, right? There's only one kind of thing, and then it's got structure like the swerve and other things, right? So, you know, the the structure is why there's different why there's different forms, and forms are why there's different kinds of things, but ultimately the substance of the things is just you know raw atoms. Now, I will admit modern physics makes this a little complicated because the substance of atoms, atoms are supposed to be indivisible and they're not, and ultimately. You get into stuff that people can mystify, and even I have trouble wrapping my head around, which is matter is actually energy, but what is energy? Just the potential to do work. Like are the potential to move. Like, so it's just like, okay, so what is it then? And you're like, structures. And I'm like, okay, so we're back to structures again. But that that's something in Marxism that where I think Lennon had a point about the people who wanted a simple monanism, where you just say there's all a thing, it's one thing, it's just stuff. Stuff is made out of atoms there, we're done. And you know, the reality of modern physics is well, there are things they're made out of combinations of all kinds of stuff, but what makes that up is charges that exist on an electrical level, which is potentiality, which is based on the ability to do work, and you're just like, Okay, so what is the universe made out of? And you're like the structures of structure, I guess.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:49

Yes, structures of structures of possibility, possible structures of possibility. Yeah, it's something like that.

Joe Payne 1:01:56

It's something like that, and that's where you know, like Zizek comes in and does his normal glib thing, but there actually is a tiny bit of ring of truth to it where, like, oh yeah, because of energy, can you really say that thought is different from matter? And I'm like, Yeah, you can because I can't actually think my way into changing the structure of an atom. At least there's no evidence.

SPEAKER_03 1:02:21

Again, I do find it funny of like the as far as we go, we're like then back at this like Aristotelian Greek understanding of matter as like just possibility. Like it's just like this unlike pri not, it's not an Aristotle, but when you get discussions of prime matter, it's just pure possibility, need forms to actually like actuate and make to put a border around it. You give a definition of it.

Joe Payne 1:02:52

But it doesn't move.

SPEAKER_03 1:02:55

God, sorry, I've like I I know my I I know my uh my my friend Max is uh he just finished his dissertation on Platinus, and so like I'm like, I'm gonna say something if I'm not careful, he's gonna be like, hang on, what'd you say there? But but yeah, but like one just being that yeah, it's just as far as we go, we never seem to get that far away. Uh I don't know.

Joe Payne 1:03:16

I mean, this comes into in Buddhist philosophy, there's a similar tradition that has the same problem, like where you you go to the dharmas and the abhi dharmas, and like nothing is essential except for the dharmas, and then you have a dharma which is the form of everything, but then you have the problem of the definitional breakdown of of dharmas, and so then you have a new concept that emerges, which is emptiness, which is not nothingness, it's actually pure potentiality. So it I just feel like humans in multiple cultures think themselves back to this problem over and over and over again metaphysically, and then why is there something rather than nothing?

SPEAKER_03 1:03:54

We can do liveness for a second, and then we get into the like do you start backward, start with the thing and work back to the first principles, or do you try to start from the first principles and get to the thing, and neither one of those seems to work out very well. That being the first one being the retroactive being the limits of Hegel, and then the going from the idea to the thing being the limits of Schelling, and we're just we're just stuck in the arch high. It's again it's a it's a bad trip from a certain perspective.

Joe Payne 1:04:24

Yeah, I mean, you do feel like whenever you touch on metaphysics, you get like each generation falls into a differently worded, slightly slightly different assumption set of what makes up the ultimate structures and stuff. Like if you're a stoic, it's literally God. If you're and by the way, when I say literally god, they believe God is material, like the world is made up of Zeus, my friend. That's what they mean that literally, like Epicurus as well.

SPEAKER_03 1:04:52

There's physical god, the stars are sometimes physical gods, at least in some Epicureans. I don't know about for Epicurus himself.

Joe Payne 1:04:58

Epicurus himself is really agnostic about it. He seems to like, I mean, like people read him as an atheist, but I tend to again like think we tend to read atheism where it's just actually ignor what we might call ignosticism, which is like I don't give a shit.

SPEAKER_03 1:05:16

Gods, so what? They're over there, they don't really I I'll live and die, and they don't really affect my life that much because right.

Marxism, Materialism, And Structure

Joe Payne 1:05:22

Yeah, that's Epicure's chance. Right, it's like if gods exist, doesn't change anything, and if they don't exist, don't change anything, so I don't care. Um, because if gods exist, they're material, blah blah blah. I mean, again, you see this in Buddhism too, where it's like ask a ask a traditional Buddhist who's not who's educated in Buddhist philosophy at all, and and ask them if gods exist, and you'll see them like turn themselves into a not because the statement of existence in this case is actually really difficult, and then you ask a Buddhist layman and they'll be like, of course they do, and it's just um it's a similar problem. And I think I I just find it interesting that Herserel gets us back there because it does seem like the early 20th century did have a full f philosophy crisis, you know, and a lot of people even considered it like the crisis of reason or the death of philosophy, and yet to me it's like no, we just hit the same apora over and over and over and over and over and over and over again, like which actually makes it not that interesting to me because I'm just like, okay, so I don't know what stuff is, but stuff exists, cool. I'm kind of mildly interested, but I'd rather deal with the phenomenology of our experience, how we conceptualize this stuff, how we talk about it, than trying to answer a question that I literally cannot answer.

SPEAKER_03 1:06:55

Yeah, I mean that's why I'm like, I like philosophically speaking, this is where it's like I think you need to go through like your critique of knowledge and your critique of cognition, your phenomenology before you can have anything like a coherent metaphysics. Otherwise, you're just what's that default assumption, those metaphysical assumptions that you've been operating under, that like when you're like, oh, what is that? And the immediate answer that comes that seems really good and trustworthy because you're used to it, you know, that that's not a good basis for establishing a metaphysics. And if you're just kind of speculating new things, I guess like concept creation is interesting, Deleuze and Deleuze like people, but I don't outside of producing dissertations that mix a bunch of people together and then those books get read for once and then never again kind of question the long-term purpose of it.

Joe Payne 1:07:47

Deleuze, it was explained to me when I was in a literary grad school, and I always tell people that if you want to know when a philosophy has reached its limit, it'll be a it'll be brought to literary theory and cultural theory, which is the elephant's graveyard of philosophy.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:02

Sorry, not there yet, I believe. I don't they don't read that.

Joe Payne 1:08:05

Hotel is not there yet, but Freud is of unfortunately Marx was there for a long time because people are like, why is Marxism studied in two places seriously and one place in this weird ass way that no one understands? And it's like, okay, so Marxian historian historiography taken super seriously, even by conservatives in the history field, Marxist economics. I mean, I think most of economics is almost trying to make Marx irrelevant. Um, so it even if he's not explicitly, yeah, explicitly there, he's there in spirit by being trying to be disproven. And but then in literature of all places, you know, you got Marxian literary criticism, which I've always been like, and that's useless. Uh but I I find this I find this to get to Deleuze and Atari, and I know I'm gonna piss a lot of people off by this, but I think they're popular because Deleuze gets you a way to do infinite dissertations and theory papers without a lot of additional research from the primary text by just riffing off other theorists and doing ad hoc concept reappropriation, and that's you know, and that's what you do. And I think it, you know, as a side note, I think it gave my field that's my field, guys. That's one of my fields, it's not my primary field anymore, but it was my field. Uh uh, it gave my field a very bad reputation. Um, and I think it's fallen out of favor, although what's replaced it is probably worse. It's like retcom analysis, it's all about like power relations and the most superficial uses of Foucault you could possibly ever do. But so maybe I should maybe everything is uh be careful what you wish for because what's gonna replace it is worse. But nonetheless, that is completely off topic. Crisis is interesting, and I think the big takeaway is um when we look at it in Marx, we do have to contact you know, and I'm interviewing you your your issue, your specialty is not Marx, but it is mine, so I'm gonna take it to where my specialty is. We do have to put Marx's use of crisis in this larger 19th, early 20th century use of crisis in Germany, and also think about the other implications of the term, which is a decision point. Because I, you know, and for Marx, you people read this as inevitability, but there's also like you know, the decision actually is our it's a common ruin of the contending classes or socialism, right? But there's a decision there, and this is also true for Herserl, it's also true for Nietzsche. I'm not quite sure what the decision is exactly, other than to become the Obermensch, and good luck knows what that is because he won't tell you because he doesn't think you can know till you do it. Then he died, or well, he went insane for Then he went insane, like for a decade, then he died. Although I think they did finally disprove that. I remember the theory that was popular when I was in grad school is that Nisha being an incel only has sex once, and that one time he got syphilis, and that's what explains his insanity. But I think the most recent genetic test on his corpse actually indicates that that is not true.

SPEAKER_03 1:11:33

So oh yeah, I think I yeah, I've heard someone was like I I think I heard recently that someone was still defending the like syphilis. But I think there was also possibly something like genetic or like related to his father. Like there may have been some sort of family illness going on or something like that. But he also had that injury when he was in the military super early. So I mean he had poor health his entire life. It's hard to tell what being I not very wealthy and living and moving around a lot in the middle 1900 or 19th century. I can't imagine it was the can the healthiest time to be alive, considering like Van Gogh, for example. So he was eating paint, I think. So that may have that may have made things worse.

Joe Payne 1:12:22

Anyway, that's that's another tangent. Sorry, I'm not that we have to deal with the effects of lead. Turns out just don't stay away from the lead.

SPEAKER_03 1:12:30

There's no safe levels of lead.

Joe Payne 1:12:32

Yeah. Although apparently it is really tasty. I would not know, but I hear it sweet. Don't test it, don't touch it. That's a warning. Although I also want to warp people off of this thing that liberals were doing 15 years ago where they're explaining the entire history of the 20th century through lead poisoning.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:47

I remember that.

SPEAKER_03 1:12:48

I remember that. I was like, I think like they were it was like, oh yeah, serial killers, all of all of like the bad stuff in the 70s, it was because of the lead.

Joe Payne 1:12:59

Not deindustrialization or civic decline or any of that. It was just leading.

SPEAKER_03 1:13:04

It's lead. And the reason why that the the boomers are right wing is because of the lead. I've heard that one thrown around recently.

Joe Payne 1:13:12

I wonder how they're gonna explain Gen Z. Is it gonna be microplastics who somehow do the same thing as lead?

Old Metaphysics, New Physics

SPEAKER_03 1:13:16

No, lead's back because there was higher amounts of lead in the vapes.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:20

So maybe the reasons I've heard this one.

SPEAKER_03 1:13:22

Maybe the reasons all over the place.

Joe Payne 1:13:26

The coils have lead in them, so there's high amounts of lead in the vape, so maybe that's why man. Millennials they like a reductivist theory that's full of shit. Like, but it sounds it sounds like you know something.

SPEAKER_03 1:13:40

I have access to the material conditions, it's lead.

Joe Payne 1:13:43

Right. Which which does kind of make me want to throw a husserole at their heads just really hard.

SPEAKER_03 1:13:52

There's like 40 volumes of the Hoosserliana, so you could definitely do some damage.

Joe Payne 1:13:57

You just get a Userl launching cannon. All right. Um we're gonna end this show talking about assaulting people with books, so which I guess would be on brand for my show since everyone's like, tell me 85 more things I should read. We'll be back. I I'd love to have you back in a couple months because I like I I want to get back into this philosophy show shows because I do think, and I it's not just because of like my interest, I do think there's a lot of stuff uh that's become repopularized in the political world that people don't have the context for, and so they say stupid shit. And I'm not gonna stop them from staying stupid shit. I just want to be very clear. I have no delusions that me doing a podcast that maybe a thousand people will ever see and maybe three thousand people will ever hear uh is going to stop people from doing stupid shit, but it will enable some of you not to be the people who do the stupid shit. So as I tell my students in less vulgar terms, kind of so we'll come back. I'm fascinated by this. I think I I know I'm unfortunately a strickler in this, but I'm on Team Italy and Germany when it comes to most things philosophical, which makes me weirdly out of step with the modern American academia, which seems to be which seems to be obsessed with France. And that's not just a post-structuralist at John Hopkins thing, that's like a long-standing American tradition to be weirdly obsessed and also hate simultaneously France.

SPEAKER_03 1:15:45

So uh it's even there in the literature, yeah. It really is the clearest in the literature from like Henry James through like the Faulkner and Alden Barat uh hanging out in France in the early 20th century.

Joe Payne 1:15:58

Yeah, I I re I once almost wrote a paper and when I was in graduate school about maybe it wasn't an accident that George Bataille and Faulkner were born and died on the same day. That I was like, I should probably get more sleep. That's a true fact, they were, but um I'm saving that little tidbit for that back to it or something. Yeah, um but I have yeah, do you know that the the what two of the most space cadetti people in the early 20th century were born and died on the same day? I mean, I'm I'm sure Faulkner wasn't actually. Did they die on the same day? I'm pretty sure they did. I need to check that fact up. I know part of I know half of that fact is true. The story's better, so the whole fact is true. Just the the but anyway. So uh thank you for coming on, Timothy. I'd love to have you back. Uh good. I didn't actually say what your credentials were. You're a PhD candidate at Villanova. Uh not a candidate, yeah. Excuse me. They're really pissy about when you call people a thing in academia. I don't know what the I think the line is when you're done with coursework and you're like this you're AD. When you finish cop comps, but you haven't defended your candidate. And then when you're in coursework, you're a student. But I don't care because I thought I find it weirdly medieval bullshit. So I just like just like you know, it would like my academic title. I would never I would never like insist, like when I was professor in quotation marks, I was actually my title was lecturer. Uh because I was non-tenure tracked full-time. And to to anybody outside of academia, I'm a professor, you know. But to academics, oh my god, did I need to recite my lineage and make sure I had every bit of it right when dealing with them? Uh, because one of the funny things about about you know, all the informality in modern academia and in English, and it is an English thing, the Germans are still weirdly insistent, you call them hell doctor, whatever, whatever. But is that to their students there's this informality, you just use your first name, but to each other, like holy shit, do you lord your academic fucking rank like crazy person? It's so weirdly medieval. Um, but anyway, on that note, and as a person who dropped out of academia, and I guess I should wish you well in it should you choose to remain. Thank you, Derek. Yeah, I people always ask me, dude, should I go to get a PhD? I'm like, I don't know. Depends on what it is and what your mood is, and if someone else pays for it. I think that's uh the important thing. Don't pay for it yourself. Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:19:16

It's like the the Pope, the Pope school pays me.

Joe Payne 1:19:20

Yeah. Pope school pays you. Exactly. So does that mean that technically some uh some minuscule amount of your work is actually coming from Tives?

Phenomenology Before Metaphysics

SPEAKER_03 1:19:32

I have no idea, but I do think all I know is that Villanova gets a Fulbright, so there's definitely some CIA money floating around Villanova, and there's probably something like ties related to Villanova. Well, because it's the Augustinians, so I don't know how that this is a medieval question. Um I don't know enough about canon law and to be able to answer it.

Joe Payne 1:19:59

So me. Got it, got it. So although in 20 years, we can say that you probably ruined existentialism by having ties to the CAA by being near someone who got a Fulbright.

SPEAKER_03 1:20:14

And maybe the Pope also, maybe that's also a problem.

Joe Payne 1:20:17

Okay, got it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:20:18

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Joe Payne 1:20:18

Just just just the future takedown. It's being written right now. All right. Well, on that note, we're gonna we're gonna end. Where can people find your work if you want to do?

SPEAKER_03 1:20:29

Yeah, so I got a couple of things. I mean, like, so academia stuff. So like I I have a publication out on all Michel Henry and Sean Luc Marion for those who are interested in like just phenomenology stuff. I also have a substack, which is uh the Hermenutes, but if you just Google my name, Timothy Schatz substack, it should come up. Where I kind of just post fragments of kind of phenomenology research, like and just occasional kind of creative nonfiction. That's kind of where I've settled on what to do with a blog where it's not like competing with academic writing time, because that's always a difficult thing to try to negotiate.

Joe Payne 1:21:06

Yeah, I remember that. My blog was all just personal stuff in the when I was in grad school. Yeah, mine used to be more of that.

SPEAKER_03 1:21:14

And then I was like, I want to do something else besides because I've been in analysis for four years, and so I feel more normal, maybe. I don't know, more stable. Yeah. Like at least my 20s.

Joe Payne 1:21:28

It only gets weirder, friend. It only gets weirder. And on that note, we really are gonna end goodbye.