The Art of Manliness - #535： The Problem of Self-Help in a Liquid Age

00:00:00.000 Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.

00:00:11.300 Self-help gurus, life coaches, and business consultants love to tell us that we must strive

00:00:15.180 for constant self-improvement to realize our full potential and become truly happy.

00:00:19.400 But it doesn't seem to work.

00:00:20.340 For many of us, life still seems hollow and meaningless despite our best efforts.

00:00:24.840 So focused are we on personal development and material possessions that we've overlooked

00:00:28.080 the things that make life truly fulfilling and worthwhile?

00:00:30.840 But what are those things?

00:00:32.220 My guest today explores the answer to that question in his book, Standpoints, 10 Old Ideas in a New World.

00:00:37.620 His name is Sven Brinkman, and he's a Danish philosopher and psychologist.

00:00:40.840 We begin our conversation discussing why modern life can feel like liquid,

00:00:44.120 and how the typical approach to personal development and self-help doesn't rescue us from drowning in it.

00:00:48.360 Sven then contrasts the common approach to treating choices and people like instruments and means to an end

00:00:53.160 with the idea of doing what's good simply because it's good.

00:00:56.200 Sven argues that we can do that by standing firm on certain philosophical principles,

00:01:00.020 and we spend the rest of our conversation discussing a few of what those are,

00:01:02.960 including the importance of endowing others with dignity, making and keeping promises,

00:01:07.160 and embracing responsibility.

00:01:09.000 Plenty of food for thought in this show.

00:01:10.460 After it's over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash standpoints.

00:01:14.080 Sven joins me now via clearcast.io.

00:01:16.400 All right, Sven Brinkman, welcome to the show.

00:01:30.140 Thank you.

00:01:30.800 So you are the author of two books that I've really enjoyed.

00:01:34.180 They're thought-provoking, has gotten me thinking about big ideas in a different way,

00:01:38.580 which I always appreciate.

00:01:40.060 The first one is Stand Firm, and the second one is Stand Points.

00:01:43.740 And we're going to focus on Stand Points, but before that, let's talk a bit about Stand Firm.

00:01:48.540 In Stand Firm, you describe our current age as liquid modernity.

00:01:54.040 What do you mean by that?

00:01:55.560 What does that mean?

00:01:56.600 Yeah, it's a phrase I take from the sociologist Sigmund Baumann,

00:02:00.980 who died not that many years ago, and he was a fantastic author.

00:02:05.720 He lived to be in his 90s.

00:02:07.900 He was in World War II and fled from – he was a Jew, so he fled to the UK and worked as a sociologist there.

00:02:15.920 And he developed this account of our times based on the idea that things have become fluid.

00:02:24.400 They have become liquid, and he called it liquid modernity,

00:02:27.540 in order to distinguish it from a more solid modernity.

00:02:31.700 You know, with industrial society, with sort of stable social norms, people knew what to do.

00:02:40.220 They were perhaps also quite often caught in a certain social position that it was difficult to escape from, and so on.

00:02:47.440 But then in the latter half of the 20th century, after the war, and especially after the countercultures of the 60s and 70s, the youth revolt,

00:02:58.920 we developed – or they developed a consumer society, a liquid modernity, when – you know, even Marx – Karl Marx predicted this in the 19th century,

00:03:09.340 when he said that with the advancement of capitalism, all that is solid melts into air.

00:03:14.100 That's the famous phrase, all that is solid, solid melts into air.

00:03:19.060 And Bauman saw this, that everything had melded into air.

00:03:23.080 Nothing was stable, nothing was permanent.

00:03:26.080 Everything was suddenly up to the individual.

00:03:30.600 And the individual had to engage in constant self-optimization, self-improvement, self-development,

00:03:37.340 work in learning organizations, be ready for lifelong learning, and so on and so forth.

00:03:43.240 All of which, I should add, are processes that have a positive side.

00:03:49.780 But when these things are constantly demanded of the individual, it's not really that positive.

00:03:55.940 It's actually very difficult to live up to.

00:03:58.840 And it creates stress and anxiety and depression in individuals,

00:04:03.140 and it makes it very difficult to navigate as an ethical being, to navigate morally,

00:04:09.520 when everything solid is suddenly melded into air.

00:04:13.520 I think all of us have felt that stress and that anxiety of like,

00:04:17.380 I've got to lose weight, and I've got to do this to get my job,

00:04:20.740 and I've got to be more positive.

00:04:22.980 Because some self-help books said that if I'm positive, it'll help me advance my career.

00:04:27.960 I think we've all felt that.

00:04:29.840 Yeah, I've been reviewing self-help books for a Danish newspaper for quite some time.

00:04:34.680 And so, I began to look at liquid modernity in self-help literature,

00:04:40.480 how this is articulated in popular culture, in self-help books, and so on.

00:04:46.860 And, of course, there are good self-help books, as within a genre.

00:04:51.500 You know, there are good books and bad books.

00:04:53.900 But I think, as a whole, the genre is a symptom of liquid modernity.

00:05:00.520 We tend to think, and these books tend to tell us, that we can solve our problems,

00:05:06.280 that we can achieve whatever is worth achieving by following seven or ten simple steps.

00:05:13.940 And so, I actually stand firm.

00:05:15.380 My own book was written as a parody of a self-help book.

00:05:19.180 I see the book myself as a cultural critique, but I articulate this critique through the genre of the self-help book.

00:05:28.080 And what I find particularly problematic about this supposed solution that we find in self-help books,

00:05:35.140 and so on, to the problems of liquid modernity, is that we can actually never succeed.

00:05:41.880 There's this trap built into the whole system that, no matter how well we do, how much we perform,

00:05:48.920 how much we engage in self-optimization, it's always temporary.

00:05:54.040 Next week, or next month, or next year, we have to do something else.

00:05:58.100 We have to be a little bit better.

00:05:59.860 We have to run a little bit faster.

00:06:01.780 We have to lose weight again or become happier, fitter, more productive.

00:06:07.060 Now, I'm quoting a song by Radiohead, I believe.

00:06:08.900 And so, when we discover this, it really creates a deep kind of despair that I think is behind all these epidemics of stress, depression, and anxiety that we see all across the Western world.

00:06:24.500 Even in a rich country like my own in Denmark, we find epidemics of these mental problems.

00:06:32.560 And, of course, this is a very complex problem, but I think much of it has to do with what Baumann originally called liquid modernity.

00:06:41.420 And I also think the problem with self-help, too, is, and you articulate this in the book, is that I think what people fundamentally want,

00:06:48.760 they want a sense of significance and meaning.

00:06:50.660 And self-help says, well, if you do these things, you will find significance and meaning.

00:06:56.200 But it's all inward turning.

00:06:57.600 You have to look, you have to find that meaning within yourself.

00:07:00.740 But as you make the case, like, that's impossible to do.

00:07:04.400 Like, you might find something, but it's going to be fleeting, and then you'll have to look for it again inside yourself.

00:07:10.640 Yeah, I think we're all, or at least many of us, are looking for something more stable under these conditions of liquid modernity.

00:07:21.260 But I think it's misguided to look for the stable ground of our lives within ourselves,

00:07:27.800 because we're constantly exposed to, you know, all sorts of trends and fads and commercials and whatever.

00:07:36.380 And, you know, these things constantly change, and we want new things, and we are never really satisfied with what we have.

00:07:42.360 That is sort of the motor of consumer society.

00:07:45.700 And so when self-help tells us to look inside, to feel within ourselves what is right and wrong,

00:07:52.760 it tells us to look in a place that is really not that stable.

00:07:58.240 And so I think this just adds to the tragedy.

00:08:00.840 And I think we need to understand that we should look, in a way, away from ourselves.

00:08:06.880 We should look at the society we're in, the culture we're in, the traditions that we are part of,

00:08:12.000 the relationships that we engage in, the people that we have obligations toward, and so on and so forth.

00:08:18.960 All these things that are, in a sense, outside of ourselves.

00:08:22.780 I think that is where we can find more stable values and demands that actually can serve as coordinates in our lives,

00:08:32.260 as an antidote, if you will, to the constant liquidity, liquidity of our times.

00:08:39.400 Well, speaking of that idea, that mantra that you hear nowadays, look within, you know, find your values inside yourself.

00:08:45.000 I think you quoted a psychologist or philosopher where he said,

00:08:47.440 well, what if you introspect and you find nothing's there?

00:08:51.420 Yeah.

00:08:51.960 And you didn't find anything there to base your life on.

00:08:55.640 Yeah.

00:08:56.140 There is a very intelligent US psychologist called Philip Cushman,

00:09:00.880 and he has a famous article from the early 90s, actually, when these problems really began to emerge.

00:09:07.620 And his piece is called, Why the Self is Empty.

00:09:11.700 And it's sort of a critique of this tendency in the Western world to look for value, meaning, and purpose within ourselves.

00:09:23.760 And he says, when we constantly look within ourselves, we eventually discover that the self is empty.

00:09:30.520 There is not that much in there.

00:09:33.360 And if there is, well, then it's constantly changing.

00:09:36.120 And then we become desperate and we begin to fill up this emptiness, you know, constantly going to see the therapist,

00:09:43.440 constantly going to see the life coach, constantly buying new stuff that should fill this emptiness.

00:09:49.320 And in a way, the only solution is to understand that, well, maybe we shouldn't look inside ourselves all the time.

00:09:57.240 I mean, of course, it's not something that should be forbidden.

00:10:00.300 And it's something we can do from time to time.

00:10:03.800 But I think as something that should, you know, lay the ground for our existence, I think it's inadequate.

00:10:12.260 And we would be wiser to look at all the things that we're part of.

00:10:17.480 Perhaps it's not that important to be able to answer the question, who am I?

00:10:22.480 What is inside me?

00:10:23.960 Perhaps it's more important to be able to answer the question, what am I part of?

00:10:28.180 What am I obliged to do?

00:10:30.940 What are my commitments as a human being within these relationships that I'm part of?

00:10:36.200 So your second book, Standpoints, talks about some of these outside commitments that we can live, you know, stand firm or standpoints that we can stand firm on.

00:10:45.820 And we'll talk about these here in a bit.

00:10:47.520 But another interesting thing you do in Standpoints, that you describe modern life not only as liquid modernity, but it's also it's become completely instrumental.

00:10:58.120 What do you mean by that?

00:11:01.080 Yeah.

00:11:01.500 I mean, the term instrumentalism is connected in a way to what we just talked about as liquid modernity.

00:11:08.820 And it means simply that much of what we do that perhaps used to have intrinsic value.

00:11:16.400 And that means that it used to be something that we should do and would like to do for its own sake.

00:11:22.640 But that has now become a tool or an instrument.

00:11:27.120 And that's what the term instrumentalization covers.

00:11:30.180 So we no longer do X because X is intrinsically valuable.

00:11:35.440 We do X in order to achieve Y.

00:11:38.580 And then we do Y in order to achieve Z and so on and so forth.

00:11:42.920 And so everything has become, of course, I'm exaggerating a little bit, but we can be more concrete later.

00:11:49.480 Everything almost has become a stepping stone to something else.

00:11:53.880 And so we never really experience intrinsic meaning.

00:11:56.900 Or if we do, we are constantly in doubt whether it's okay, whether we are wasting our time, because shouldn't we be doing something useful, something that will take us to the next stage or the next step or whatever in our development plans?

00:12:12.280 So that's the problem of instrumentalism.

00:12:14.680 It exercises meaning from our lives because meaning is connected to that which is intrinsically meaningful and intrinsically valuable.

00:12:24.680 And then, of course, the big question is, what is intrinsically meaningful and valuable?

00:12:30.540 And the book is actually about that question.

00:12:33.340 Well, before we get to that question, what are some insidious examples of instrumentality in modern life where people don't realize they're being instrumental, but they are?

00:12:43.060 Yeah, yeah.

00:12:43.860 Well, I try to provide a lot of examples from different areas of life.

00:12:48.360 And sadly, they're very easy to think of.

00:12:51.180 For example, to begin with my own sort of local life in the institutions that I'm part of, we have public universities in Denmark, and I'm part of that.

00:13:00.880 And we used to have independent universities that saw knowledge as an end in itself.

00:13:08.260 I mean, we should develop knowledge in order to be wiser, in order to find out more about the world that we live in.

00:13:16.420 And now universities are increasingly controlled by political goals that say that, well, we should develop knowledge that will help us increase our gross national product, that will help us become more effective, be able to beat the Chinese in the global competition for market shares and so on. 0.94

00:13:38.000 And that leaves so many forms of knowledge without a chance, knowledge of ancient Greek, knowledge of French culture, philosophy, whatever, because it isn't really something that can boost the gross national product of the country.

00:13:59.020 So knowledge is no longer an end in itself.

00:14:01.880 But more seriously, or more, you know, at least in an ethical sense, more problematic is that when we begin to approach human relationships instrumentally, when we begin to think of friendship as something that is a tool for the individual's success.

00:14:20.180 If you look at, I mean, we call them friends, the connections we have on Facebook, instead of a circle of friends, we now have LinkedIn connections and so on.

00:14:31.060 And what are these relations?

00:14:32.940 Well, they are basically sort of empty relations that I can mobilize, for example, on LinkedIn, if I want to advance in my career.

00:14:43.180 And that is not proper friendship.

00:14:46.060 I mean, friendship, if you have a friend, you will be there for the other, regardless of what you sort of can take away from that, I mean, or get out of it.

00:14:58.460 A friend is not an instrumental person in your life.

00:15:01.440 A friend is someone you will help, regardless of, you know, any ulterior gains you may get from that.

00:15:09.060 But love relationships, I mean, romantic relationships, have also increasingly become instrumentalized.

00:15:16.200 We navigate in our love life, according to the question.

00:15:20.740 So who is right for me?

00:15:23.120 Who will realize me and myself to the greatest possible extent?

00:15:28.600 How can I really commit to another person?

00:15:30.920 If I always have this question in the back of my mind, could there be someone else who is better, who's a better tool, basically, in the project of making me happy?

00:15:44.920 And I mean, these are just some examples of instrumentalism, which is, I think, so prevalent in our culture that it's, in a way, actually quite difficult to talk about because it's so basic now.

00:15:57.500 So it's more or less our basic outlook on life and other people.

00:16:02.100 No, when I read that idea about instrumental, I started thinking about other ways I've seen it prop up, particularly in the self-help genre.

00:16:07.980 Because, like, I'm guilty of this as myself, like, when I've written articles on our website, like, you need to do this thing because of this.

00:16:14.480 Like, one was, like, gratitude, right?

00:16:16.480 It's not long, you should be grateful just to be grateful.

00:16:19.000 It's the right thing to do.

00:16:19.660 It's, well, no, it makes you feel better, increases your health, it reduces stress.

00:16:24.320 The other one was, like, play, right?

00:16:27.000 You know, like, kids should play because it helps them increase their math scores.

00:16:30.960 Well, we used to be, like, kids should just play because you should play.

00:16:33.560 It's fun.

00:16:34.060 You just do it because it's fun.

00:16:36.020 It's a fundamental human value to play.

00:16:38.100 And now, in schools, you know, they have play curricula that, exactly as you say, as opposed to boost the pupil's math scores, you know, linguistic competencies or whatever.

00:16:51.500 And, you know, even these very particular human phenomena that we don't see in other living creatures, at least that we're aware of, for example, forgiveness.

00:17:01.080 There's a chapter about forgiveness in the book, and I find this a most fascinating topic.

00:17:05.800 But when you look at how forgiveness is treated in the self-help literature, and even by, you know, serious psychologists, it's almost always instrumentalized.

00:17:17.740 And I mean by that, that people are encouraged to forgive others because it will make them feel better.

00:17:24.700 It will, you know, set them free and they can live their lives in a different and more productive way and so on and so forth.

00:17:30.360 And, of course, there's nothing wrong with that.

00:17:32.220 That's very good.

00:17:33.660 But it's not really forgiveness then.

00:17:36.680 I mean, if we forgive the other in order to benefit from that ourselves, then it's not really forgiveness.

00:17:44.640 Then it's like a trade on a market.

00:17:47.440 I forgive you in order to achieve this myself.

00:17:51.040 But really, if you think about it, forgiveness, if it even exists, and that's an open question, but if it exists as a human phenomenon, forgiveness, then it's a gift.

00:18:00.940 It's something you give unconditionally.

00:18:04.020 And that is characteristic of all these phenomena that I call standpoints, all these phenomena that have intrinsic values.

00:18:11.420 They are unconditional.

00:18:12.460 If we put them into a calculus and ask, so what's in it for me to forgive, what's in it for me to love, what's in it for me to live in a way that protects the intrinsic dignity of the other person and so on, then we really reduce these human values to instruments for our own purposes.

00:18:35.520 And I think that is, in a way, I don't want to be too dramatic, but in a way, it's a form of ethical violence, I believe.

00:18:43.100 And you also make the case that this instrumentality can lead to nihilism or nullism.

00:18:49.740 Yeah.

00:18:50.760 There is a very interesting philosopher, Simon Critchley.

00:18:53.620 He's at the New School of Social Research in New York City, originally from the UK.

00:18:57.880 But he writes about these things, and I found in his work this distinction between two kinds of nihilism.

00:19:08.680 One is, well, nihilism is the theory, if you will, or the belief that nothing ultimately has value.

00:19:17.760 If there is value in the world, it's something we subjectively project onto the world.

00:19:23.680 The world itself is just, you know, matter in motion, or, you know, like, you know, Woody Allen would talk about, you know, existential philosophers would talk about, the world is absurd, there's no value in the world, it's all meaningless, right?

00:19:38.640 But so, we cannot live like that.

00:19:40.600 And then the philosophical tradition of nihilism and existentialism will say that we have to create value, and we do that subjectively, exactly by looking into ourselves and then projecting this value onto the world.

00:19:57.540 And then Simon Critchley makes this distinction between two kinds of nihilism.

00:20:02.380 One is active, and it says that, well, values have been destroyed by, I don't know, modern society, capitalism, yeah, modernity, whatever.

00:20:13.880 And then we have to, you know, actively create value together.

00:20:18.620 In the most extreme case, this is done through revolutions, you know, like in communism or terrorism, as in, you know, Islamic terror and so on.

00:20:29.400 But they try to create a certain order in the world that has meaning.

00:20:34.460 Of course, for most of us, fortunately, this is not an option.

00:20:38.700 We are neither Islamic terrorists or communists or anything like that.

00:20:43.320 So, for us, the option is what Critchley calls passive nihilism.

00:20:48.080 And that is about creating meaning exactly through what you talked about before, this inward-looking movement.

00:20:56.540 I create meaning by finding out what is important for me, what feels right for me.

00:21:02.460 And if it feels right for me, then it is right.

00:21:05.260 And then I am allowed and I should be encouraged to project that onto the world as such.

00:21:11.920 And I find out about what is right for me through mindfulness or life coaching or meditation or psychotherapy or any other kinds of, you know, techniques of self-discovery, self-improvement and happiness that we have available in the modern world.

00:21:31.060 And the point is that this, at first glance, it looks like something liberating.

00:21:37.840 It looks as if it's emancipatory because it gives the individual so much power to create meaning and purpose.

00:21:45.260 But Critchley would say, and I would agree with him, and a host of philosophers and also psychologists are now sort of discovering that it's not really emancipatory.

00:21:57.620 It's not liberating.

00:21:58.960 It's actually the opposite because it makes us solely responsible for everything in our lives, which is unbearable.

00:22:06.720 It's a form of despair, as my compatriot son Kierkegaard would say, and we become little gods in our own lives.

00:22:15.180 And that is not really a good way of living for human beings.

00:22:18.420 So again, we are back to the necessary search for alternatives.

00:22:24.100 If we are not the sole creators of meaning, purpose, and value, if we cannot passively discover it within ourselves and create it, then how can we find it?

00:22:36.240 Where can we look for it?

00:22:38.200 And again, the answer must be that we should look for it in our relationships to something beyond ourselves, other people, nature, culture, history, tradition, all the important institutions in our democracies and so on.

00:22:51.980 So we're going to take a quick break for your word from our sponsors.

00:22:55.760 And now back to the show.

00:22:57.520 So let's talk about some of these standpoints.

00:22:59.820 You start off with Aristotle, and I think you start off with him because he kind of lays the foundation for the rest of these.

00:23:06.100 He was like the father of anti-instrumentality.

00:23:09.500 What was his idea that you took from him on how to stand firm on something firm?

00:23:14.700 Well, to be a bit, to say it in a rather simple way, I would say Aristotle, who was a fantastic thinker and scientist, I mean, in all the different disciplines, we have biology and physics and chemistry and psychology and so on.

00:23:32.120 And psychology, sorry, Aristotle inaugurated, in a way, all these different scientific disciplines.

00:23:37.640 And I would say that his greatest discovery, and in a way, it's a discovery that is up there with Darwin's discovery of evolutionary processes and Einstein in relativity theory, even though it sounds much more trivial.

00:23:55.380 Aristotle discovered that there are certain things, certain values in the human world that are intrinsically valuable.

00:24:05.180 He discovered that there are certain things we ought to do just in order to do them.

00:24:11.560 And if we instrumentalize them, we really, well, shoot ourselves in our feet, as we say.

00:24:18.520 Let me give you an example.

00:24:19.440 If we walk by a river and we witness a small child who's about to drown in the river, and we stand there considering, should I really try to save this child?

00:24:34.600 The water looks so cold.

00:24:36.140 It looks very unpleasant for the child, but it would also be unpleasant for me to jump in.

00:24:40.760 I don't know if I can do it.

00:24:42.460 Am I brave enough?

00:24:44.100 What will I gain from doing it?

00:24:46.840 Will it make me happier?

00:24:48.240 You know, there is research, serious research done in health psychology that supposedly, allegedly demonstrates that if you do such moral acts, you live longer.

00:25:01.540 It lowers your blood pressure.

00:25:04.240 And so, if all these things become the reason why we should try and save the drowning child, then we instrumentalize the action.

00:25:12.440 And Aristotle, sorry about the long digression, now I'm getting back to your question.

00:25:16.240 And Aristotle discovered that there is only one legitimate answer to the question, why should I try to save the drowning child?

00:25:25.620 And the answer is, well, if you don't do it, then the child will drown.

00:25:29.940 That's the answer.

00:25:31.300 And by that, he meant that the action, in a way, legitimizes itself, you know.

00:25:39.380 And if we find a reason for doing it somewhere else, outside the action, then we instrumentalize it.

00:25:46.260 And we shouldn't do that.

00:25:48.140 So, that's the beginning with Aristotle.

00:25:50.160 He would say, in all human activities, there are so many things we do in order to achieve something else.

00:25:56.240 We don't go to the doctor because it's fun to go to the doctor.

00:25:59.420 We go to the doctor because we want to be healthy.

00:26:01.780 But health is a basic human value.

00:26:04.700 We cannot really ask, but why be healthy?

00:26:08.220 No, because health is just intrinsically good.

00:26:13.660 And so, his project became to develop an account of all the phenomena that exist in a human life that are intrinsically valuable.

00:26:24.420 And he was very successful in doing that.

00:26:27.660 He identified a whole lot.

00:26:29.880 We have already talked about some of them.

00:26:31.520 Friendship, for example.

00:26:32.920 I would add, you know, democracy or trust or, of course, for Aristotle, also ethical action and so on and so forth.

00:26:41.600 But that project has sadly been, well, forgotten.

00:26:47.540 It's too strong because, of course, we have had philosophers working in this line of thought all the time.

00:26:52.800 But I think in liquid modernity, with the rise of instrumentalism, it has really become difficult to pose this fundamental question, what is just valuable in itself?

00:27:06.140 We tend to think that nothing is valuable in itself.

00:27:08.440 It's just valuable because I choose that it's valuable.

00:27:12.080 But that's nihilism, and that's not going to help us.

00:27:15.660 Yeah, Aristotle, I mean, has had a huge influence, not only on the world of philosophy, but also theology.

00:27:19.720 I mean, he had a big influence on Aquinas, where Aquinas basically took Aristotle's idea of the good, like you do something because it's good in of itself, and, you know, said, like, well, you do something because God says to do it, right?

00:27:31.640 Because God is good, and you're going to follow him.

00:27:33.520 And so you see that play out as well in the world of religion, too.

00:27:37.900 Yeah, Aquinas is quite an interesting character.

00:27:40.340 He tried to synthesize the Greek legacy, particularly from Aristotle, whom he simply referred to as the philosopher.

00:27:47.300 I mean, Aristotle was just the philosopher, even though, you know, he knew about Plato and many other philosophers.

00:27:54.520 Aristotle was the guy.

00:27:56.280 But to synthesize Aristotle and Christianity was the great project for Aquinas.

00:28:02.200 And I mean, if you look at, I know that I'm a psychologist, but I also have a background in philosophy, and I follow philosophy, academic philosophy.

00:28:09.520 And if you look at all the philosophers working around the world, I mean, so few of them are now interested in the questions that we now talk about, in the questions that Aristotle and Aquinas were interested in.

00:28:23.520 Most of them work on, you know, little technicalities in modal logic or, you know, something about bioethics, whatnot.

00:28:32.140 And all these things are important, too.

00:28:35.120 But my point is that most of us become interested in these questions, in philosophy, because we want to know how to live our lives.

00:28:43.500 And I think philosophers really should return to those ancient questions, because that is really the reason why we have philosophy, in order to help us address those questions.

00:28:54.520 So, Aristotle, you do good because it's good.

00:28:58.620 The second philosopher and an idea you took from him was Kant, and this is the idea of dignity.

00:29:03.440 So, what is dignity, and what does the instrumental view replace dignity with in the modern world?

00:29:08.680 Yeah, for me, it's important that Immanuel Kant, the great philosopher of the Enlightenment, follows the chapter on Aristotle.

00:29:16.180 Aristotle and other Greek philosophers were very clear that because humans have a unique kind of rationality, we're able to fathom that certain things are intrinsically valuable.

00:29:30.620 We should do the good in order to do the good, and not in order to achieve anything else.

00:29:35.760 We may achieve something else, but that's not the reason why we should do it.

00:29:38.980 But the Greeks did not know that human beings are intrinsically valuable, and the term we traditionally use to address that is dignity, human dignity.

00:29:52.420 I mean, Aristotle had slaves, women were not considered as rational beings that one could really count on in the Greek polis.

00:30:03.040 And so, in the history of ideas, it's a revolution in our view of human beings, and probably Jesus was the first to talk about this, and it entered philosophy in different ways.

00:30:18.640 But it's very clear in the Enlightenment with Immanuel Kant when he says that human beings have dignity, which means that we cannot trade humans on a marketplace.

00:30:30.060 We cannot think of human beings as creatures with a price that we can buy and sell.

00:30:38.660 That is just totally wrong.

00:30:40.520 Well, it's not totally wrong.

00:30:42.640 I mean, for Kant, and I would agree with him, it's inevitable that we have an instrumental relationship to other people.

00:30:49.920 That's okay.

00:30:50.940 The problem is if we only have instrumental relationships to other people.

00:30:55.380 As he would say, we should never treat other people exclusively as means, but also always also as an end in itself, as an end in themselves, right?

00:31:07.460 So, if I go and buy some milk in the shop, in a way, the person in the shop is an instrument that I use in order to buy my milk.

00:31:16.020 And conversely, I am an instrument for the shopkeeper because I give him or her some money.

00:31:23.640 And so, we have this market relationship to each other, and that's perfectly fine.

00:31:28.280 We engage instrumentally with each other.

00:31:30.980 But let's say that the shopkeeper has a heart attack while I'm buying my milk, so I cannot get my milk.

00:31:36.520 Then it's very disturbing because I wanted my milk.

00:31:40.180 And so, if I begin to shout in the shop and say, well, please give me a new shopkeeper because this one broke down.

00:31:46.620 I need a new one so I can get my milk.

00:31:48.720 Then I'm guilty of, well, insanity probably.

00:31:52.440 And then the problem is, also according to Bauman, with whom I began to talk about liquid modernity, that we have these instrumental relationships to other people in our times, which makes the other just a tool for my desires and preferences.

00:32:11.300 The other becomes someone I should make use of in order to realize whatever wish I have to buy my milk to become successful or happiness in life, to make a career or whatever.

00:32:25.860 And again, it's okay to have an instrumental relationship to others as long as it is grounded in a much more fundamental understanding of the other as an end in itself, as we all are.

00:32:41.940 I mean, that is, we have human rights.

00:32:44.860 We have civil rights.

00:32:46.500 We have this fundamental understanding in our institutions.

00:32:49.940 We should have, at least.

00:32:51.180 Perhaps we are gradually losing it, unfortunately.

00:32:54.500 But we should have this fundamental understanding that everyone has equal value just in virtue of being human, regardless of what we produce, of what we achieve, of how beautiful we are, how rich we are, how successful we are.

00:33:13.700 You know, regardless, we have equal value.

00:33:17.020 That's a radical idea when you think it through.

00:33:19.560 The Greeks did not have that idea.

00:33:21.420 They thought that people had value relative to how well they did, right?

00:33:27.820 And then Jesus, and I'm not talking about, you know, religion here.

00:33:32.420 I'm not talking about metaphysics or a belief in a god or something like that.

00:33:38.080 I'm simply talking about the history of ideas when Jesus of Nazareth came and said, 0.94

00:33:46.000 it doesn't matter if you are a beggar or a prostitute. 1.00

00:33:49.560 Or a king, I will eat with you because you're a human being and you all have equal value.

00:33:57.700 That is a way of addressing human dignity that sort of cuts across all the differences that certainly exist between people.

00:34:05.500 And Kant made this the fundamental principle of his ethics.

00:34:08.880 And I think this is the jewel of what we consider Western philosophy.

00:34:15.840 It might exist in other philosophical systems too.

00:34:18.500 I don't know much about those.

00:34:19.840 But in my opinion, it's certainly the jewel in the line of thought that runs, well, at least from the birth of Jesus, through the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and up to our times.

00:34:33.120 And we should do whatever we can to protect that jewel.

00:34:36.020 Something that you touch on the book, and I've noticed too after I read about this, read this chapter, was not only do we sometimes, not sometimes, but often treat others merely as a means and instrumentalize others.

00:34:49.540 But we also do it to ourselves, right?

00:34:51.300 We don't have, like, there's like not a sense of self-dignity, right?

00:34:54.440 And you see this where people, I don't know, do things on social media to get attention, right?

00:35:00.220 That's undignified.

00:35:01.400 And you're like, you look at it and you're like, oh, man, why are you doing that, man?

00:35:04.100 Like, that's, don't do that.

00:35:06.240 And like, but they're doing it because like it'll bring them value, it'll get them attention, which would hopefully lead to money and fame, whatever it is they think they want.

00:35:13.500 Yeah, exactly.

00:35:14.860 You talk about the fact that it will bring them attention.

00:35:18.280 And I think that is very precise because attention has become how we really think of value today.

00:35:27.540 If you can get attention almost, you know, regardless of why you get attention, then you have done something valuable, which when you think of it is a rather insane idea because you can get attention by, you know, doing all sorts of silly things or evil things by killing others or whatever.

00:35:45.920 So we have this attention economy that is really, I would say, dangerous and part of this whole system.

00:35:54.000 And I think you're absolutely right.

00:35:55.460 I haven't thought so much about that aspect and I haven't written about it.

00:36:01.140 But this principle of dignity should certainly also be applied to ourselves.

00:36:07.360 I have actually been interesting in the emotion of shame because shame is not a very popular emotion.

00:36:13.980 It's certainly painful.

00:36:14.900 It's one of the key emotions that function to regulate social life.

00:36:21.960 And I talked about religion before.

00:36:24.940 It figures already in Genesis, you know, when Adam and Eve begin to feel shame the moment they achieve self-consciousness because they have eaten from the tree of knowledge, from the forbidden fruit.

00:36:38.000 So it's intimately connected to self-consciousness, so it's intimately connected to self-understanding shame.

00:36:43.160 And the danger we have now is, well, one of the dangers, there are many, but one related to this point is the danger of shamelessness.

00:36:53.480 If we are not capable of feeling shame, but we will do anything to attract attention, then we no longer have dignity.

00:37:02.340 And ultimately, we can no longer be moral beings because the capacity to feel shame when you do something shameful is fundamental to morality.

00:37:14.940 And it's not a coincidence that, you know, an incapacity to feel guilt and shame is a key criterion for antisocial personality disorder or sociopathy or psychopathy.

00:37:29.440 If psychopaths exist, I'm not an expert in that field, but if they exist, the key defect is probably this lack of shame.

00:37:41.140 And so, again, to return to the self-help world and the idea of self-development, much of what goes on there is about learning to avoid shame, to, you know, not feel shame.

00:37:55.480 And I think this is very wrong because, well, of course, the point is not that we should go around and feel ashamed all the time, certainly not, but we should have the capacity to feel shame and guilt and all the other moral emotions without which we couldn't be moral creatures.

00:38:17.300 All right. So, dignity is a standing standpoint.

00:38:21.160 The next one you talked about that stuck out to me was an idea you took from Nietzsche, which is interesting because Nietzsche, you know, I think incorrectly is believed to be sort of the father of nihilism and et cetera.

00:38:32.680 But he wasn't. He actually had some really interesting ideas about what to do in this liquid modern world of ours.

00:38:39.100 And one standpoint you took from him was the idea of promises.

00:38:42.240 What can we learn about promises from Nietzsche?

00:38:43.900 Yeah, I should say that I don't pretend to provide a complete interpretation of, well, neither Aristotle or Kant and certainly not Nietzsche.

00:38:56.420 I admire much in Nietzsche. There's also much in his works that I disagree with.

00:39:02.480 I think he's often misunderstood. As you said, people read him as a nihilist.

00:39:07.460 In reality, he saw the problem of nihilism in Western culture.

00:39:11.820 He saw actually many of the problems because he was a genius more than a hundred years ago, many of the problems that we now talk about.

00:39:20.680 But I think he did not really come up with good solutions, if you will.

00:39:27.480 But there is this passage in one of his books when he talks about the human being as a creature with the right to make promises.

00:39:36.980 And so I am interested in the role of promises in human life and in the conditions that must exist in order for such a wonderful thing as a promise to make sense in the first place.

00:39:52.440 Other animals don't make promises.

00:39:55.100 It's a unique human, uniquely human phenomenon.

00:39:58.780 And what is the precondition for promising something?

00:40:04.560 Well, a promise only makes sense if you have what another philosopher, a Frenchman called Paul Ricoeur, called self-constancy, right?

00:40:15.760 Because if you're not the same person tomorrow when you are going to, you know, fulfill the promise as you were yesterday when you made the promise, then the practice of making promises is meaningless.

00:40:29.880 But it isn't meaningless.

00:40:32.160 It's a fundamental phenomenon in human life.

00:40:35.900 It's the basis of marriage, of contracts between people, you know, buying and selling stuff.

00:40:42.240 We make promises to each other.

00:40:43.940 I made the promise to you some time ago to be available today.

00:40:48.740 And let's say that I had a different idea.

00:40:52.460 I didn't really feel like talking to anyone today.

00:40:54.600 I would rather, I don't know, go into the woods and look at the birds.

00:40:59.800 Then you would rightly approach me and say, but hey, you promised to be available.

00:41:05.140 You promised to talk with me.

00:41:07.460 And it would be absurd if I replied to that.

00:41:11.620 No, that wasn't me.

00:41:13.040 That was Sven Brinkmann two months ago.

00:41:15.460 And now I'm a new and better version of myself.

00:41:17.800 I'm no longer obliged to do what the old Sven Brinkmann promised.

00:41:21.240 Now, because I've paid so much money to my life coach or whoever who taught me that I should do whatever I feel like doing and not think of what other people think of me.

00:41:32.680 I mean, that would be absurd.

00:41:33.940 And it illustrates the idea of promising from Nietzsche and the idea of self-constancy from Recur that without this continuity in our commitments, in ourselves, in our personhood, nothing in the human world can really stick together.

00:41:54.940 And then I'm worried when I read the self-help books or I look at how we're encouraged to act in our lives by all sorts of psychologists and therapists and what have you who say that, well, life is about constant development.

00:42:16.060 Life is about changing all the time.

00:42:18.420 Life is about realizing your potentials.

00:42:22.220 It's not about being the same.

00:42:23.980 It's not about self-constancy.

00:42:26.140 It's about self-development.

00:42:28.420 And in reality, of course, life is about both aspects, self-constancy and self-development.

00:42:34.200 But if you only emphasize one of them, if you only emphasize self-development and forget about self-constancy, then ethical life is no longer possible.

00:42:43.420 Promising is no longer possible.

00:42:44.880 Only a certain kind of animal-like state is possible.

00:42:52.000 And we wouldn't want to reduce ourselves to that, I think.

00:42:57.260 So promises.

00:42:58.220 Make a promise.

00:42:59.320 Keep a promise.

00:43:00.080 Even if it's inconvenient.

00:43:01.880 Even if it doesn't further your goal as a self.

00:43:06.020 Just make the promise and keep it.

00:43:07.340 If you begin to ask the question, so keep my promise, well, what's in it for me?

00:43:14.840 Then, you know, you can no longer think of yourself as an ethical being.

00:43:20.940 That's very undignified.

00:43:22.440 If you made a promise, well, then all things being equal, of course, you should do your best to keep it.

00:43:29.100 Period.

00:43:29.760 I mean, that's just the basic fact of human life.

00:43:33.220 And it's scary that some people even discuss this, I believe.

00:43:39.500 So another philosopher you took a standpoint from was Hannah.

00:43:44.040 And I don't know how to pronounce her.

00:43:44.860 I always mess up her.

00:43:45.640 Arndt?

00:43:46.240 Arndt?

00:43:46.960 Hannah Arndt? 0.84

00:43:47.640 Yeah.

00:43:48.180 I mean, she was of German descent.

00:43:50.380 So probably Arendt.

00:43:51.580 Arendt, yeah.

00:43:52.440 Okay.

00:43:53.000 Well, her standpoint was, even if there is no truth, man can be truthful.

00:43:57.820 So what does she mean by even if there is no truth?

00:44:00.220 Because people would say, well, she's just being subjective.

00:44:02.640 She's doing that nihilism. 1.00

00:44:04.300 What does she mean by that?

00:44:05.920 Yeah, I'm not sure that she actually believes that there is no truth.

00:44:09.560 But she says, well, even if there is no truth, there might be and there might not be.

00:44:14.840 But even if there isn't one, then we can still be truthful.

00:44:18.880 We can still live our lives in a way that commits us to certain things, that gives us this kind of self-constancy that I just talked about with reference to recur.

00:44:29.800 So that's a way of arguing in favor of these standpoints without committing myself to, you know, a very strong form of objectivism.

00:44:41.820 The idea that these fundamental values just exist outside space and time, outside human life and so on, I don't think they do.

00:44:50.540 I think there is a certain truth to be found there.

00:44:53.500 But Ahrendt says, well, even if there isn't such a truth to be found, then this doesn't leave us without standpoints.

00:45:01.980 It doesn't leave us without value, non-subjective value, because we can still be truthful.

00:45:08.820 Even if everything happens by chance or by coincidence, well, that doesn't mean that you should act by coincidence, right?

00:45:19.600 This thought also goes back to the ancient Stoics, actually.

00:45:23.700 Marcus Aurelius, the wonderful philosopher, emperor, known mainly today through the movie Gladiator.

00:45:30.620 He said that even if everything happens by coincidence, then still you don't have to act yourself by coincidence.

00:45:39.800 And I think that is something worth considering.

00:45:42.720 So, one last standpoint I'd like to talk about from a philosopher is Camus, which I thought was interesting because, you know, earlier we were talking about sort of this nihilism of, you know, life is absurd.

00:45:54.960 This is kind of brought up by the existentialists.

00:45:56.740 And Camus was one of these guys.

00:45:58.240 Like, there's, you know, life is, there's no meaning in life.

00:46:01.860 You make meaning.

00:46:03.100 But you were able to find a standpoint from him.

00:46:05.380 What was that standpoint you took from Camus?

00:46:07.260 Yeah, I have quite an ambivalent relationship to the existential philosophers.

00:46:13.800 I think there are, you know, sparks of genius, obviously, in Sartre's works and in the works of Camus.

00:46:21.560 But especially with Sartre, I think it slides too easily into subjectivism and nihilism.

00:46:29.480 I mean, the idea that we just create value subjectively.

00:46:32.740 It's not there before we live or before we decide that something is valuable.

00:46:38.020 I think Camus is much more sophisticated than that simple form of existentialism.

00:46:45.500 And I also think that he would dislike being referred to as an existentialist.

00:46:49.820 Of course, we can talk about him as an existential thinker.

00:46:55.220 And people, when we mention those today, address those today, they tend to think of them as, you know, people who saw human freedom as absolute.

00:47:08.260 Human life is about being free without constraints.

00:47:12.820 And then Camus says in one of his articles that freedom is not constituted primarily of privileges, but of responsibilities.

00:47:22.980 And if you have responsibilities in order to be free, then you don't create yourself and your own life and all the values that are important out of nothing.

00:47:36.140 No, you discover in a way that something is already valuable and you already have responsibilities because you already have relationships to other people.

00:47:48.920 And Camus would say that this is not a threat to freedom.

00:47:52.960 On the other hand, it's a precondition for freedom.

00:47:55.840 And I think initially it's a difficult thought to grasp, but I think it's very deep and I think it's very true.

00:48:04.420 If I can return to Immanuel Kant, we talked about him in the context of human dignity.

00:48:10.420 He has such a wonderful image of what I mean and what Camus meant in one of his books.

00:48:16.400 He, it's a metaphor of the dove, you know, the bird that flies through space and it feels the pressure of the wind on its wings and Kant imagines that the dove thinks to itself,

00:48:33.620 well, it's okay to fly, I kind of like it, but it would be better if I could fly in a vacuum because then there wouldn't be this annoying air that blocks my free, you know, movement through space.

00:48:53.680 And then Kant says, well, little dove, you forget one thing, namely that if you were in a vacuum, you couldn't fly, you would fall to the ground because it's the air that at one or the same time, in a way is blocking your free flight, but it's also making it possible, right?

00:49:16.540 So in a vacuum, there is no air, so you just fall to the ground.

00:49:19.720 But it's these factors outside yourself that actually resist your free movements through space or through life, if you will, that also enables you to be free and enables you to move around.

00:49:35.560 So if you didn't have responsibilities, if you didn't have commitments, if you were just an atom that looked inside yourself for whatever, you know, motive for what should I do, I don't know, let me feel about it inside myself instead of let me think about it, then you wouldn't be free.

00:49:56.900 You would always act coincidentally.

00:50:02.140 Everything could be different.

00:50:03.260 I mean, and that's not freedom.

00:50:05.360 That's just chance.

00:50:08.200 And freedom is not the same as acting out of chance.

00:50:12.880 Freedom is acting in a conscious, willed, and responsible way.

00:50:19.020 And I think Camus actually articulated that very well.

00:50:22.000 All right, so that standpoint from Camus is like freedom is a standpoint, but it's not the freedom of liquid modernity where there's no restraints, you do whatever you want.

00:50:30.000 It's a freedom that's tied with responsibilities.

00:50:32.960 Yeah, it's what Isaiah Berlin, the great historian of ideas, called positive freedom.

00:50:40.820 He worked with two concepts of freedom or liberty, a negative one and a positive one.

00:50:47.080 And the negative one is probably the one we have today.

00:50:51.740 And it means that we are free when there are no constraints.

00:50:55.800 I mean, we are free when we are free from demands, constraints, outer structures that impinge on us, whatever.

00:51:05.100 And that's why he called it negative freedom, because it's a freedom from something.

00:51:08.900 But positive freedom is a freedom to do something, is a freedom to try to live up to the responsibilities and commitments we have.

00:51:19.720 And I don't think one of these concepts is totally correct and the other is totally wrong.

00:51:26.640 I think our idea of freedom has different sides.

00:51:31.000 It's a complex one.

00:51:32.220 And I think it has both positive and negative aspects, to use the terminology of Berlin.

00:51:38.720 But I think we have forgotten about this idea of positive freedom, that we are not born free, if you will, even though a baby has certain preferences, it has certain needs, it has certain desires.

00:51:53.240 And even if all those needs and desires are fulfilled all the time, then we don't think of it as free.

00:52:00.480 That's strange, because it cannot act.

00:52:02.780 It cannot be responsible.

00:52:04.480 We don't put the baby to jail if it breaks the law.

00:52:08.500 At least we shouldn't.

00:52:10.300 And why don't we do that?

00:52:11.980 Well, because the baby has not yet become an autonomous person that is able to be responsible for what he or she does, the baby has no commitments or no responsibilities yet.

00:52:30.980 So we become free when we gain responsibilities in our lives.

00:52:35.260 And again, the important point is to understand that all these outer demands, constraints, and responsibilities, they are not a hindrance to human freedom.

00:52:48.040 No, they are a precondition for human freedom.

00:52:50.200 And I think that is what we need to acknowledge.

00:52:53.500 Well, Sven, there's so much more we could talk about.

00:52:55.120 We could have talked about your fellow Dane, Kierkegaard, and his idea.

00:52:58.620 But where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

00:53:00.960 Well, I have written a whole lot of books, some of them in English, some have been translated into English.

00:53:11.020 There's actually a trilogy now.

00:53:12.500 We talked about the first two in the series, Stand Firm and Stand Points.

00:53:17.100 But there is a third book called The Joy of Missing Out, which is more about how to create communities, institutions, well, even societies, actually, in which these standpoints become visible, in which we can institutionalize them and live in accordance with them.

00:53:39.860 So it's not just an individual project.

00:53:42.700 I think that's important.

00:53:43.780 So those three books, apart from that, I tweet Sven Brinkmann, but mostly in Danish.

00:53:54.980 I also have a podcast, a radio program, but also in Danish.

00:53:59.800 So I'm afraid that people have to learn Danish if they want to listen to my voice.

00:54:05.840 But if they do that, they can actually also read Kierkegaard in the original language.

00:54:11.160 So they can follow in the footsteps of Jean-Paul Sartre, the great existentialist, who learned Danish in order to read Kierkegaard in Danish.

00:54:22.600 That's a good goal.

00:54:23.580 I've actually had goals to learn languages that philosophize.

00:54:26.540 I want to learn German so I can read Nietzsche in German.

00:54:29.120 And learn Greek so I can read Aristotle in Greek.

00:54:32.280 All right, so maybe, okay, we'll tell people, take a year, learn Danish, and then listen to your podcast.

00:54:39.320 Yeah, thank you.

00:54:40.740 Please do that.

00:54:42.500 All right, well, Sven Brinkmann, thanks so much for your time.

00:54:44.660 This has been an absolute pleasure.

00:54:45.800 Thanks for all your good questions.

00:54:47.380 It's been a pleasure and a privilege to appear here.

00:54:51.120 Thank you.

00:54:51.460 Thank you.

00:54:51.480 Thank you.

00:55:21.480 And if you haven't done so already, I'd appreciate it if you take one minute to give us a review on iTunes or Stitcher.

00:55:29.660 It helps out a lot.

00:55:30.400 And if you've done that already, thank you.

00:55:31.880 Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who would think would get something out of it.

00:55:35.640 Shoot him a text message with the link to the podcast.

00:55:37.900 As always, thank you for the continued support.

00:55:39.800 Until next time, this is Brett McKay.

00:55:40.980 Reminding you not only to listen to the A-Win Podcast, but put what you've heard to action.

00:55:51.480 We'll see you next time.

00:55:59.580 We'll see you next time.

00:56:00.400 Thank you.

The Art of Manliness - August 19, 2019

#535： The Problem of Self-Help in a Liquid Age

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