James and the Giant Podcast: Philosophy Outside Academia

“I read philosophy so you don’t have to.”We know the particular kind of headache studying philosophy can be. The language can be so tangled, like wadded threads. And it is in the untangling, the ah-ha, that grips us. The problem with philosophy is that people don’t read it. It’s not only that they don’t, it’s that they can’t. They get tied up in the language. I want to share philosophy with people that have no exposure to the field, and do so in a way (and this is the trick) isn’t intellectually pea-cocking or boring. How can I get people engaged with philosophy? Bring it out of something else.

“The use of imaginative fiction is to deepen your understanding of your world, and your fellow men, and your own feelings, and your destiny.”

― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction

I spent quite a lot of time in Earthsea. I followed Ged through troubled waters, mountain cliffs, desert sands, and a land dryer than even that desert. You never leave the story–that is, nothing you read takes you out of where you are–but the gift of these stories, the gift of all good fiction, is the philosophy that is woven in around you; it blankets you while you sleep, daydreaming in the waters of Earthsea. If we take some time and look at what we say and what we mean, there’s so much to explore. My podcast, James and the Giant Podcast, doesn’t want to take that comforting blanket away; it’s warm and needs to be held tightly. I just want to show you what it’s made of. The problem I had with reading in school is the same problem others have confronting philosophy. I didn’t know how to penetrate the text. People love stories and storytelling, and if a book grabs you, you’ll read it. Those tangled threads, the ones we trip up in? It’s the fabric. So I explore philosophy of language in Earthsea, talk about Heidegger’s being-toward-death in the third book, and posit (wrongly, I think now) that Ursula K LeGuin had Heideggerian influences. So you get to hear about wizards and dragons, semiotics and metaphysics; and it’s magical.

Fiction gives us the unique opportunity to explore philosophy in a context we already enjoy. Sometimes understanding the philosophy underlying a text helps us recognize what we hated in a story, a fundamental characteristic of a person or plot wrinkled our faces but we don’t know why. Have you ever finished a book or a movie and emulated a character from it for a while afterwards? An impression left that isn’t just the character’s attitude, its their being, their philosophical outlook, their way. But what I really want is to use imaginative fiction and philosophy to get creative.

What’s empowering about Ursula’s fiction is that it takes us to places entirely new, different than our own–but neverthless actual other worlds. Our planet is only briefly alluded to in The Dispossessed–nothing was made of our planet’s struggles because our focus was on different problems than our own.

Ursula’s science fiction is so powerful because of the space she gives us between where we are and what’s going on. It’s in that distance that we see different solutions to problems. Fiction allows us to think outside of ourselves in a way realism doesn’t; we aren’t bound by laws of physics, rules of culture or animality. We can imagine genderfluid societies; we can imagine anarchist societies built-in material struggle like in The Dispossessed or in absolute splendor like in Iain M Banks’s The Culture series. What’s important about these imaginings is that they cast into question our assumptions of the order of things and our assumptions of “necessary consequences” of such in perspective because the story makes us imprint these assumptions onto our reading–our assumptions weren’t there until we put them there. Sometimes challenging an assumptions isn’t enough, but what if it were never there? What if we stopped trying to solve things realistically and imagined something fantastical? Will we sew blankets inside our chilly prison walls or weave a rope to rappel down our ivory tower?

Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisioned by the enemy, don’t we consider it his duty to escape?. . .If we value the freedom of mind and soul, if we’re partisans of liberty, then it’s our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can! – Ursula K LeGuin

Another philosopher whose work recently stood out to me was Mark Fisher. Most of the thinkers I find interesting are postmodern, since I am stuck in history. Fisher wasn’t the first thinker to question where we go from here, puzzling over the postmodern condition, but he was who stuck to me. How can I navigate this postmodern space, and what’s on the other side of the horizon? Derrida, for all his faults, is still a big influence on me. I think Fisher and Derrida both languished in that anxiety of feeling stuck but having hope for an other side. What else is there for philosophy to do, but to escape itself? What outlet better lends itself here than imaginative fiction? We can use certain fictional works to philosophize outward, synergizing imagination with philosophy where the restrictions of time and space and context are different. We’re stuck in history, stuck in time, but not stuck in place.

But the first step is getting philosophy to the forefront, or at least a sideline. We have the tools to disseminate information everywhere, if philosophy isn’t part of that extracommunal process its indicative of a problem within philosophy. I love the other popular philosophy podcasts, they are incredibly cool to me. The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps? Partially Examined Life? I was so happy to find them. I can’t do what they do, and some of my podcast might be a watered down version of theirs, but not all of my listeners listen to those podcasts.

Personally, two major inspirations for my podcast were Jon Greenaway (@TheLitCritGuy) and Oliver Thorn (@PhilosophyTube). Their work is directly involved in chewing up theory and–excuse the expression!–baby birding it into your mouth. I want greater access to philosophy so we can have greater numbers doing philosophy and have, one hopes, greater philosophy.

Philosophy needs to get outside of itself. Philosophers should be teaching, but also penetrating our thoughts, infiltrating our ideas, excavating surprising consequences. Philosophy is everywhere; it’s our work–both lay and academic philosophers–to show it to others. By exploring fiction, I hope (against hope?) to find a way to show others the patterning, the loose ends, the tight-knit of the philosophy of a story and get them to see it entirely different, then reflect on the world around them, as all good storytelling demands.