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  • Weird Studies

    • Weird Studies/Spinoza/transcript

    22 Aug 2026 - 22 Aug 2026
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      • "Is that a pine tree behind you in your office? No. Actually, it is what is called an elephant bush, or it actually has a bunch of names. Portulacaria afra, I believe, is its official, Linnaean moniker. And, it's some people call it a miniature jade plant because the leaves, which are small, like a centimeter or less wide, have the same kind of spatulate shape and fleshy emerald green appearance as, jade plants. And this one, I found in our local greenhouse. Helen has been, just gardening the fuck out. Nice. And, and we we're we're going through spring, although today feels like winter. And on a trip to May's greenhouse, I saw this cute little guy who's been trained up to in a kind of a pine tree shape. Yeah. Looks looks like a looks like a conifer, but it's not. Anyway, so he's my new friend that keeps me company when I'm working in my study. Looks like you have a tree in your office. It looks great. Yeah. And I'm thinking when Christmas comes, I'll put, like, a little Yeah. String of lights around it. And yeah. I like it. I I both my wife and I, I think Leslie will forgive me for saying this, but both of us suck, at gardening. Although, that's, no, this is really unfair because Leslie has managed to, you know, do something at least in our front yard with the garden. But, it's just not, it's not something either of us has a knack for. My mother on the other hand I was gonna say, you might be comparing yourself to your mother Yes. Whose garden is just splendiferous. Yeah. It's like even spilling the small confines of the plot that she has. It's just like it's like a Versailles in, it's it's a pocket Versailles Yeah. Is what it is. My mother is a champion gardener. She's won competition. She's, like, really, really good at it, and she's obsessive about it the minute spring starts. I mean, she I think she hasn't she was smart enough not to start so early this year even though we've been having some spring like weather. But today, we've got, a snow dump on the on the go. I think we're gonna get, like, 10 centimeters of snow today. Man, that is some bullshit. Yeah. But, anyway shit. She she has this one plant that I don't know the name of the plant, or I can't remember it. It's a tropical plant, but it's a plant you can grow indoors in Canada. You know? And she and it's not supposed to grow very much. It's just a typical indoor plant, but this fucking thing has been growing on her. Like, it's I've never seen anything like it. She she had to move it into her bedroom, and it basically takes up 25% of the room. It's gigantic. It's a huge tropical monstrosity that shouldn't exist, you know, at these latitudes at all. Like sea I'm imagining something like Seymour in Little Shop of Horrors. Yeah. Exactly. Except it it's it it doesn't have a doesn't have flowers, except down south, it does sprout flowers every year. And 1 year a few years ago, this thing, in its infinite love for my mother, in its yearning to be ever closer to her, because you can actually feel the kinda almost gross, you know, love that this thing holds for my mom, sprouted a bloom that was one of the most disgusting things I've ever seen in my life. A single disgusting grotesque flower that popped out as a kind of gift to her and then just eventually just fell apart. Aw. And, but that was like It's like a little kid bringing a misshapen pot that they did at school. Look, mommy. I made this for you. But from what I've beautiful beer. From what I've gathered from a gardening perspective, this is essentially a kind of, a horticultural miracle that happened in my mother's bedroom. So And, well, love can move mountains. Exactly. Love is the source of all true miracles, I believe. True. And actually, this is interesting because I just went out for dinner with some, graduate students, and we got to talking about an episode of Mythbusters that I never saw, but it was about plants and this and, you know, ideas about plants as having some kind of ability to receive emotions or or to have a kind of emotional wavelength or whatever, you know, like the idea that if you play classical music to your plants, they'll grow better. Whereas if you play very harsh sounds, death metal or something, then they don't grow as well. If you scream at your plant, it will grow less well than if you say kind things to it. And so they That's what we've been doing wrong. That's okay. I'm always cussing the shit out of the plants. I shouldn't do that.
      • It's weird when I've stayed with you. Wake up at 5:30, and I hear this, like, screaming, and I'm like Yeah. Do something with yourself. And it's just j f standing out there in his bathrobe. Say something, you asshole. Old bricking asshole. Talking to a plant. Anyways yes. So they actually did, like, you know, very Mythbusters y experiment, apparently. Again, I haven't seen the show where they had somebody screaming at a plant and then, for a period of time, and they measured the growth and then and keeping all other variables as consistent as possible and then speaking gently and sweetly to the plant. And they actually found, a difference. And the funny thing is because, of course, Mythbusters, as much as I love that show and I do love that show, I have very fond feelings for, both the show itself, which I watched when with my kids when it was first on the air, and also for the people who made it, who seem like wonderful people. Nevertheless, the the the default naturalism of the enterprise apparently asserted itself, and they're like, oh, well, there's probably, probably because, you know I don't know what it was. Carbon dioxide from your breath. Somehow, they thought maybe that was what was causing the improved growth for the person when when the person was talking nicely screaming at it would be even better. Yeah. You'd think. Yeah. But, you know, we have to save the appearances. Yeah. As long as we aren't put in the uncomfortable position of having to acknowledge the possibility that perhaps plants do have some kind of emotional receptivity, As long as we can put off that, the day, the evil day when we might have to reckon with the sentience and spirit of the world around us, then we're good. Yeah. So anyway, that was Wow. That's interesting. Find it very easy to believe that plants have a kind of, it's an intuition, you know. Action. I I I know it's true by virtue of my employing what Spinoza calls, like, the 3rd kind of knowledge, which is direct intuition of the essence of things. Man, I'm reading the ethics right now, or I'm listening to the ethics on my walk on my walks, and, it is so freaking amazing. Somehow, I gotta get you to read Spinoza's Ethics so we can do a show on it. It'll happen. Read it or listen to it. It's actually quite listenable. But, he he comes to this wonderful place. And halfway through the book, you're like, this guy's a rationalist tyrant. He's a he's a fanatic of rationalism. But then in the 5th book, he just accesses this new plane, and it's just so mind blowing. But, anyways, I feel that plants are sentient. Well, they are. I mean, by some definition, they they are sentient. They react to their environment. They they act in their interests, and they do all the things that sentient beings do, albeit very minimalistically maybe. But I feel very strongly that I know to feel that you know something. Is that knowing it? I don't know. I feel that I know that plants respond to, emotion emotional stimuli. Oh, can I just run and get a book? Sure. You just reminded me of something I just read, and I want to fetch this book. But it sounded like you still had more to say on this topic That was it. Before I do. That was all. Okay. Yeah. Hold on for a sec. I have to put on some, like, Leroy Anderson type hold music while I go. Music. Yeah. Found it. I wanna be able to, thank a listener for this recommendation. So, last week, I think, a an anthropologist named Kartik Panchena Panchenathan, I hope I am saying that somewhere in the vicinity of correctly, Got in touch with a message saying that, Marshall Sollins' last book has been published and, recommended it to our attention. So Sullins is one of the great anthropologists of the 20th century, and he died, I think, at 21 very recently. And his last book, which he dictated after suffering paralysis and going through a certain period of time in a disassociative state, which he snapped out of, like, despite all of these physical infirmities and challenges at the end of his life. He managed with the assistance of, Frederick b Henry junior and his son, Peter Sollins, and one gets the impression to host of others in his family and outside of it, he managed to finish his last book. And this is like it's like throwing a megaton bomb on your way out the door. This is a real special book, and I think that we should do okay. You were just, saying we gotta do Leibniz's, or no, Spinoza's Ethics. I think we should do this book. It's got weird studies written all over it. It's called The New Science of the Enchanted Universe, an Anthropology of Most of Humanity. And the very subtitle of that, an anthropology of the most of humanity, makes a point that we have made repeatedly, which is the modern construal of the universe is a late and rather eccentric addition to the inventory of human cultural practices and notions. And he is developing a way of thinking about how a lot of traditional societies and indeed in a lot of, kind of unacknowledged ways, even our society, even our modern world is predicated on an idea of an enchanted world, in a world a world where a distinction between spirit and things, in other words, a kind of transcendentalist spirit, does not obtain. Mhmm. And right from the beginning, he goes on this riff about how Saint Augustine is actually an animist. And I was like, oh, shit. JF has got to read this. Mhmm. But, he makes the reason I am bringing this book up is because we were just talking about, you know, rationalism and Sentient plants. Essentient plants. And particularly how, you know, you read Spinoza, maybe the first four books of the ethics, and you're like, oh, this guy is a a rationalist. And then you get to the 5th book, and suddenly everything goes sideways. And one of the things I wanted to say, and this is something I think that's been implicit in lots of conversations we've had, is that it can be a surprisingly short distance between a supposedly disenchanted and rationalist take on reality and its seeming opposite. And I wanna read a passage to you from this point at this point. Before you read it, let me just let me just agree with you by saying that that's kind of what you were on to with your comments about myth Mythbusters. Right? Which is that, they you you you experience enchantment. You come up with some placeholder thing so that you remain what you construe to be modern. Right. And so you say, oh, it must be the carbon dioxide that I'm breathing onto the plant, etcetera. But the thing is that that this is what we're talking about when we say that the problem isn't that we're modern, but not modern enough. It's like we don't follow the kind of interior logic of our own epistem to its rational end, which ends up bottom bottoming out an enchantment. That's what happens with Spinoza. Pushes rationalism to such a point where it it just bottoms out in an animistic universe filled with enchantment. Oh, okay. Anyways, you were you were gonna say. Well, you know, you can one thing you can think of this is just coming to me now. You can kind of think of the modern as a kind of meditation, as a kind of meta meditation, the meditation of an entire culture where we are meditating on certain things. It's a very thinky kind of culture, and so it's a certain kind of meditation, where we are pursuing our thoughts, but as we pursue them. You know, it's the nature of the modern, it seems to me, is removing the stops to that process of collective meditation. And so the nature of modernism actually is to go there. And what you see in the history of the modern is a series of stops that are being imposed to prevent us from getting to the place that modern thought wants to go, where it must naturally go. I call that I have a whole a whole bit about that. I call it blindsight, which is a condition where someone if this is an actually existing, neurological condition where someone sees but experiences blindness. So you can hold something in front of them. You say, what color is this handkerchief? They'll say red, but I can't see it. And they'll be right. So so this there's much much to discuss here, but I wanna I wanna hear this quote. Okay. So wanna read. This is at the beginning of a chapter called meta persons, and this is quite relevant to some of the work that I'm doing right now, revising our care of the dead piece. The, idea one idea I have in that piece that we're doing together with Jacob is that, you know, in a lot of parts of the world, in a lot of periods of human history, the dead, cohabit with the living. They are part of what we might call a polis, Mhmm. Perhaps anachronistically, but, you know, part of the the the the sense of community. And this idea of metapersons that Sullen adapted from someone else, but I forget who, is kind of a a way of framing that a little bit theoretically. That the kind of persons that the dead or that animals or that the that gods and demons, the kind of persons that they are are not quite the same as human persons. Human persons are very finite, very limited, but there's as much vaster world of meta persons that whose doings entirely determine and sort of sub can our own. Anyway, one point that Sollins seems to be making I've not gotten terribly far in this book, but I intend to. One point he seems to be making is that it actually can be kind of a short hop from a lot of the, you know, kind of materialist or naturalist ways we have of framing things. And so on page 70, he has the following thought experiment. Here's a thought experiment that may help us, the presumably disenchanted ones, understand the enchanted universe of imminentest and spirited cultures.
      • Suppose all the, quote, magical things that make our current lives, all the appurtenances, meaningful and technical, whose substance and forces we did not make ourselves. I'm assuming he's talking about things like, you know, your phone or whatever. Imagine that such things were recognized by and as their humanized effects. Suppose they were proper subjects with real agency. Suppose the books and newspapers we read, the smartphones and computers we use, the radios we hear, the television sets we watch, the flags that distinguish us, the Michigan football team or Chicago Cubs baseball team whose wins and losses we can feel as our own, the turkey that makes our Thanksgiving, and the spruce tree that makes our Christmas, some of us. The car that transports us, the ignition key that starts a powerful motor, the parents who, though now dead, come to us in dreams and in the house and the furniture they left us. Suppose all these things and more that constitute our existence were known for just that, for their human or subjective influence rather than by their naturalistic attributes. The newspapers, quote, teach or, quote, inform us about people and events in some distant place we did not see in a recent past we did not live, but all of which we imagine to be real and to have really happened. That is what we call myth when peoples without newspapers do the like, perhaps even knowing that the narrative itself has the person powers to teach about what the ancestor persons and god persons did. We look at the television set, which by some extraordinary powers brings us images of persons and things that we understand to be real existence, real persons and images. But as in Rene Magritte's surrealist masterpiece, even this is not a pipe. Subjectively speaking, how different is that from the people, things, and events we see in dreams and are real enough when we are dreaming?
      • What I like about that is, that it's actually a much more real realist attitude than the naturalist alternative. Yeah. Right? I will never experience my phone as anything but some agent in my life that helps me do things and annoys me in other ways. Like, there is no proper relationship to have with, an inanimate object. There is no more proper, relationship one can have with such objects than a kind of interrelate and a relational, and ultimately personal sort of relationship with them. These things exist in our lives only because of their agential or, teleological function. They exist only because of what they do. And to constantly have to subtract that from what things are, what's imaginary here? Is it the experience of the world for what it is and how it interacts with us, or is it the naturalist, model that we insert behind the world constantly or constantly have to try to to reduce the world too?
      • Yeah. Like, that to me is much more imaginary than a a basically, broadly speaking, animistic attitude to the to the world. Yeah. Well, you know, it's funny because on their most recent show that we dropped on pretension, we briefly touch on what Charles Taylor calls the subtraction hypothesis, which he finds Right. Highly unconvincing. The idea that the universe is exactly as naturalists understand it, and that all we needed to do was subtract the enchantments of religion, the the false consciousness of religion, in order to see the universe as it truly is, from which point of view this the mental style of scientific modernity isn't a style at all, but simply, what we see when we finally, you know, clean the window through which we're Yeah. Viewing reality. We turn off the Terminator overlay of religion, you know, and just see the world as it is. Yeah. But, you know, actually, from the point of view of, you know, just where this conversation has been going, it's actually kind of the opposite. That what the mental habits of the modern of of scientific modernity insist upon doing is adding something, superimposing something to our basic experience of the world, which as you say is always one of ourselves as an agency embedded in a vast ramified network of agencies. Yeah. An actor network as Bruno Latour would say. Sure. Yeah. And and then from that point of view, having to remind ourself, yeah, well, that thing is your phone isn't really alive of the, you know, the you know, this isn't really a consciousness. It isn't a being. That in fact is, you know, that is not your actually your experience. No. And then you you need this this this naturalistic layer to be superimposed on that in order to contain it. And in a way, this is this naturalism from the point of view of what I was just saying a moment ago is the ultimate stop to the meditation that is the meta meditation that is the modern. Wow. That's a hell of a pretentious thing to say, isn't it? Or we're gonna be saying that all the time now.
      • Yeah. I know. Now it's it's it's it's like the centipede that somebody asked, how do you walk with all those legs and he could never walk again? You know? Yeah. Now I'm questioning every pretentious thing that I say. So no. I totally agree with you. I mean, the argument that naturalism levels at the phone to argue that it's you know, to convince us that it's not conscious or at a rock or at the sun or at a god or whatever, at at Sherlock Holmes, at an imaginary character, to to to basically, divest these things of their appearance of agency, that argument can be leveled at a person too. Mhmm. I mean, that's essentially what behaviorism in its most radical forms was doing. Yes. That's certainly what, the Churchlands and their famous, you know, eliminative materialism papers from the eighties, I think, were arguing is that consciousness is simply a kind of epiphenomenal fog that has no no actual no reality beyond some, kind of, algorithmic heuristic strategy that the body employs to move itself around. Like, there's nothing there. Essentially, we are all mechanical dolls, and and it's not like we have reason other than bad reasons because I know there are lots of bad reasons. It's like when people argue that, there's no such thing as free will, but there but, you know, quantum physics shows us that everything's probabilistic, but probabilistic does not equal freedom. Probabilistic is just really complicated rational reasons.
      • Yeah. But anyways, so it's the same kind of there's a lot of bad reasons why we can still stave off the moment where we decide that every human being is just simply an inanimate object, a a sophisticated robot. But they're like, since they're all bad reasons, they're not gonna they're not gonna survive a truly radical, naturalist subtractive move. And so the alternative is, like to me, it's like either nothing is conscious or everything is. You know? And this is exactly where Spinoza goes, just to get back to that. Spinoza, he's a wonderful thinker. Like, the way he resolves you know, because you know how Descartes split the world into mind and matter, you know, thought and extension. It's like, and he he spent a long time trying to figure out how the 2 connected. Right? He couldn't make them work together because they're different substances. Had something to do with the pineal gland as I recall. Yeah. He ended up in the pineal gland because it's the essentially the most rarified or the most abstract material object, and it responds. It's it doesn't make sense. It doesn't work. But you have to create intermediaries, and this was William James. Exactly. Arguments against dualism is he's just sort of like, or actually argument against idealism, a kind of a monistic approach where, somebody like a Hegelian, for example, is having to create a bridge between but he's like, but then you need bridges for the bridges, and then bridges for those bridges. Yeah. You you you just you can't create a bridge between 2 substances without that bridge being another substance. Yeah. Ad infinitum. Yes. Right? So so what Spinoza's solution was was simply to say, well, there's one substance. He calls it, you know, dieus sive natura, god or nature. You can you can call you call it nature from the point of view of extension, from the point of view of matter. You call it god from the point of view of thought. It's the same thing. Oh, it's true. That we and this is the craziest thing. This is one of the most sublime philosophical ideas I've ever encountered. I'm not sure anyone will feel it the way I feel it. I get, like, goosebumps. He says, God is a single substance that manifests to us in 2 attributes, thought and extension. So you can think of your phone in terms of its agential Yeah. You know, role that it plays, which is thought, or in terms of its material its materiality, which is its its extension. You can never nothing exists that doesn't exist equally in both attributes. But then he adds, but God has infinite attributes, which I think is just crazy. So you got we have thought and extension, mind and matter, but God has an infinite number of additional attributes that are as different from one another as mind and matter are, which to me is, like, the ultimate sublime idea of, like, boom. I was just like, I can't even begin to understand what the world is. Well, and of course and of course, you never could understand either. No. You never could. As partial Although partial beings, like, we we live in a world that where we've got mind and extension. Yeah. Exactly. I would argue that what we what Jung put his finger on with synchronicity is the beginning of a human conceptualization of a third attribute that we can access, which would be, like, the imaginal or the symbolic, which is not it's not thought. It's not matter. It's this third thing. Mhmm. And Spinoza doesn't go there, but he kinda kinda feels his way around it in the 5th book. But, anyways, point being, there are there with Spinoza, you know, and a lot of physicists were big Spinoza Spinoza fans, and a lot of physicists are very comfortable with a basically animistic construal of the universe as Jacob is fond of reminding us. And, and and so but you can't you can't conceive of Spinoza's single substance with an infinite number of attributes, 2 of which are thought and extension in a nonenchanted way. The universe meaning is is baked in to the universe. Meaning is simply the thought dimension of the material universe, and and modern materialistic, naturalism is simply that's the subtractive move. You're subtracting a a dimension of the real, and assuming that it's, it's simply epiphenomenal or simply projective. Mhmm. So I agree with your critique of, of Mythbusters. Well, I feel a little unfair for saying this because I haven't actually seen that episode. And, also, I would never wanna talk shit about Adam and Jamie. Those are those those guys are beautiful. I still watch well. I still watch Adam Savage. I've actually mentioned his, his, YouTube channel tested on this show before because he he thinks about you know, if Adam Savage were, like, one of the races in Tolkien or, I guess, in D and D in in a fantasy world, he would definitely be a dwarf. The dwarves are you know, they're sonic beings. They live under mountains. They're they're they're they're they are of the earth, and they're good with their hands. They're master craftsmen. And they create these intricate toys for dwarven children that are the envy of all the other races of Middle Earth. And, they you know, there's this kind of genius of the, the the dwarven people. And it's the same thing in a lot of fantasy. I I think I once talked about how on Skyrim, one of these deals in the video game Skyrim is that the dwarves used to exist in that world, but they vanished mysteriously, like, overnight, and they left their grand underground palaces and cities and these incredible, intricate, beautifully made objects that some of them they're just, like, mysterious. Nobody really knows how they work. I love that. That's a kind of a fantasy trope that I love. And as all as is true for, I think, all fantasy tropes, it actually tells you something real about human beings, about the world that we live in. And there are there there is a kind of person that has that kind of a genius, that kind of intelligence. It is the intelligence of earthy things, earthly matter. Mhmm. A a genius of the the making and the the deployment of physical elements in the making of incredible ingenious things. And there is this, you know, there's a spirituality to that. Although I'm although dwarf folk, I think, often, feel uncomfortable with such talk. But, this is what I admire about somebody like Adam Savage. He seems to be a pure instance of the dwarven folk in their highest aspect. I hope he hears this and puts it on his website because that's a good blurb. He, Adam Savage is an Earth elemental for sure. Yep."