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Exploring Loneliness and Justice: A Discussion on 'Red' and 'Perfect Days'
Join our conversation where we delve into the themes of loneliness, solitude, and justice in two profound films: 'Red' from the Three Colors Trilogy and the recent 'Perfect Days.' Our discussion is inspired by a Nietzsche quote and explores how these cinematic works address human connection, self-reflection, and the notion of living a meaningful life. We uncover the nuances of characters navigating isolation amidst interwoven destinies and reflect on the lessons these films offer for our own lives. Watch and explore how mindfulness, simplicity, and justice play pivotal roles in shaping our existential journey.
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Direct self-observation is not nearly sufficient for us to know ourselves: we require history, for the past continues to flow within us in a hundred waves; we ourselves are, indeed, nothing but that which at every moment we experience of this continued flowing… To understand history… we have to travel… to other nations... and especially to where human beings have taken off the garb of Europe or have not yet put it on. ~ Nietzsche, Human, All too Human
In this easy-going conversation, Dale and Krzysztof reflect on their recent travels to Sicily, Italy and Molokai, Hawaii, respectively.
Churches were seen, ruins explored, Zen temples experienced, and lessons on How to Live cultivated.
We hope you enjoy.
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This is part II of our conversation with Karen King. For Part I, please click here.
The following automated transcript of our conversation inevitably alters or distorts some of the content of the recording. The original recording is by far the better and more accurate representation of what’s on our minds when we offer Fire Philosophy audio-video events such as this one. We share this transcript anyway, but ask that you not quote it due to the frequency of its errors.
Dale Wright: Our word passion in English (and probably goes to other European languages for a while at least) allows both good and not-so-good outcomes, right?
Mozart was passionate and great athletes are passionate and yes, people, murder so on. So as you get both the extremes, I wonder, was there a word in Coptic or ancient Greece that could encompass? Or it was just pure energy and mental enthusiasm that wasn't necessarily either negative or positive?
Karen King: Well, “love” would be one of those? You know there was the potential for ecstatic experiences of all kinds but if you think of passion, of course, it comes from the Latin related to the word “passive” and “passivity” is being subject to something and so the question is what you're being subject to, and certainly Christian texts and presumably this one as well would understand that receiving the Holy Spirit at baptism would be a kind of possession, which is something that Christians understood.
Dale Wright: St. Francis receiving passionata.
Karen King: Or just anybody who was baptized, it would be an exorcism of evil spirits and a possession by the Holy Spirit. So that everybody is in that sense, possessed by spirits is just who's in charge. But yeah, no, strong feeling but not the anger of Peter and not jealousy that he shows in this text and so on and so forth those are leading him astray.
Dale Wright: I'm really interested in mind body dualism as it pops up, and I have a sense, having studied the history of religions across the Euro-Asian landmass, that at roughly the same time, it was just happening everywhere and that it took very similar forms.
So you find Buddhist versions of this and Hindu versions of this and Chinese versions of this, although Chinese is a little bit on the outskirts. But something was happening in the broad spectrum of human culture, where there was elevation of culture through communication across duration that gave rise to that ability to say “I'm not my body.”
I'm not just my body, I have a mind and to not think of yourself as just body and therefore to be able to maybe stand back from your anger or hatred and so on that those capacities are just becoming human, that they're evolving into human cultures and that it's happening across the board in really similar, although slightly different ways, and that the mental, spiritual advantages of that realization or that thought, whether true or not, carries forth into the enormous learning that's given rise to contemporary culture all the way through the history of West and East where the focus on the mind or the spirit may be over the body or in juxtaposition with the body— that development was enormously consequential for the evolution of human culture and that literacy probably had a great deal to do with it.
The invention and the spread of literary capacity, so the growth of knowledge— you didn't have to hold everything in your head and the ability to learn gives rise to repercussions of the mind-body split that I think we forget in contemporary culture where we're so negative about mind body dualism, right?
So since the 19th century—we European, Western culture anyway, but elsewhere as well—engage in fierce critique of mind-body dualism. And we do it because of Darwin and the implications of our— I mean, it's only been two centuries since we've understood at all that we're animals, that we're mammals, and that we are connected to this animal world.
And the rehabilitation of the Olympics, from its end of the Olympic Games in Greece, all the way through, you know, athletics is gone or sidelined, and in the 19th century this happens in Germany, in France, in England, all of these cultures begin to give rise to an interest in the body and its connection to the mind, where we now know that our brain is the substance of our mind, or the basic framework, the substructure of our mind, and that it's part of our body, and it gives rise to mentality, and that mind and body are really one.
So this whole set of thoughts just sends me reeling into an effort to understand the whole history of the evolution of human culture through that distinction that was made between spirit and matter or mind and body in this classic way, all the way across Eurasia.
You don't need to respond to that question. That was a major thought that I've been mulling for, for many years now.
Karen King: You talked about things like literacy that made it important and what was it like, do you think? What changes happened? What difference did it make when people began to think of themselves as a mind and not a body? In what ways did that make a difference in people's living?
Dale Wright: Well, one it gave rise to enormous courage where your soul is unkillable, right? So the martyrs can think of themselves as “Okay, I can do this. This doesn't get to me. This is not me. I am not my body.” So that's one thing, but, the negative repercussions of that… with suicide bombers and so on today is that concept, the majority of people in the world believe that there is a soul, probably immortal in most cases, that transcends their body. So that mind body dualism is very much in effect now, even if intellectuals dismiss it as you know, untenable.
Karen King: I mean, in the martyr case with early Christians, people have argued that what is called courage is a gift of God. But other people would call it fanaticism and call it social control and see it negated as violence and horrible murder that people stupidly were willing to undergo.So that comes out of a modern notion; it very much rejects that kind of notion of the spirit, right?
Dale Wright: One of the negative repercussions of mind body dualism, but you, you can take, to take it back to the Gospel of Mary, it all is based on your understanding of how things are set up. And once you're lodged in an understanding, that has implications for how you live. And so that kind of enormous courage or the willingness to sacrifice yourself to be a martyr derives from an understanding that was really real to them. It's not just they believed it. “Belief” just sounds too shallow. It's— that was true, right? That was just the reality they lived.
Karen King: Yeah, I agree with that. And I am just endlessly interested in this question about what difference that made on the ground, you know, what is it like to inhabit the belief that the body is not the self and it seems to me that it did make a difference with people with regard to a whole set of values of distinguishing what's important when you had to make choices and the questions about what's real and what's really real. Where do you spend your time? Do you spend your time on the cultivation of the interior life? You know, the cultivation of the mind, is that important? Is it important to relativize? The material things for these other values are people's souls, you know important, but not more important than their bodies? I mean, how does one understand then the relationship between the two and so on and so forth?
Dale Wright: Well, I think you and I, and Krzysztof, to some extent, the three of us, are living exampless of mind over matter— we've dedicated our lives to the quest for knowledge and growth of our minds and so on.
And that's what science is about, right? And it gives rise to an emphasis. Not a total obliteration of bodily life, but an emphasis on mental life. I mean, novelists, poets, musicians, you know, living a life of the spirit. All of that has got to have something historically emergent to do with mind body dualism.
Karen King: But I guess I think that it folds back over the possibility of making a more just world, of making a world of flourishing for people, that it isn't just for itself. It just doesn't stay in the mind. It has to be also about the capacity to live well which involves sociality and involves social worlds and social structures, relationships to others and the quality of being together and hopefully spills over into our physical world and our capacity to understand ourselves as animal creatures, among other animal creatures.
Dale Wright: Yeah, I would say all of that you just mentioned— this great ability to care about others, the whole list you just gave, those are all mental insights, those are all cultural developments that emerge out of our spiritual nature.
Karen King: Yeah, I just might not be willing to prioritize the spiritual the way that that is.
Dale Wright: You already have.
Karen King: Well, Mary has. Yes. And look at these books behind me, right? Yeah, yeah. Really physical.
Dale Wright: Yeah, but your deep concern for the justice in society and the well being of others—those are are spiritual insights, right? Those are realizations that you come to mentally. And so I'm not arguing to overcome our overcoming of mind body dualism. Like all of us I'm a product of contemporary culture where I'll get up from this conversation, I'll want to go walking. I want to go work out. I'm going to do something. And I try to eat well and I do all these things about my body that are important to me. So that overcoming of mind body dualism, where we just don't care about the body, is creeping its way through culture so that even people who are, let's say, Muslims or Christians or whoever, really believe in the soul, and I'm only my soul and I'm the spirit. They absorb contemporary culture, too, and they're paying attention to their diet, and they're jogging and they're doing all these things…
Karen King: Yeah, but those things are also very important in terms of health and taking care of oneself, but they're still focused on the self.
And I'm just really interested in the social, in the work that post-humanists are doing in thinking beyond the human social. And the new materialisms that really understand the agency of objects and they want to rethink the position of the human in a larger cosmos.
And that's an intellectual task. It's a task also of the soul and of the mind, but it's very much one that's engaged in a planetary kind of thing.
Dale Wright: I'm with you on that. You look at concern for the body, which is so different in our time than it has been in past cultures, it's very social, right?
You do it with others, right? You play tennis with others, you do sports, you go jogging with others, you go to the gym, right? You're with others, and they are social enterprises as well.
Karen King: The interest in violence gives a different spin on that, where people are threatening other people and people are harming other people and what is it about the necessity of the cultivation of the spiritual self that really works against the enormity of violence, the capacity to look at others and see souls and not see the differentiations that are written on just what happens to be human material bodies, but yet care for those bodies, right?
But still, those pieces are really, really important.
Dale Wright: Would you think of violence as both a bodily thing, but also a deep mental thing, a spiritual thing?
Karen King: Absolutely.
Dale Wright: We conceive of the hatred in our mind and we carry it out with our bodies.
Karen King: I've just gotten too bought into the sense that we don't have a thought and then act it out, but that thinking and acting are so deeply implicated with each other and form each other in those kinds of ways, but that dealing with violence has an incredibly important spiritual component, absolutely.
Dale Wright: For us as scholars of religious studies, the eruption of violence in and among religious communities is deeply disturbing, deeply troubling and deeply interesting if we think of where violence is emerging in the Middle East and in America and in Europe.
Karen King: That article I wrote that I sent you, I really like its message about the sensibility about the rise of the soul, seems to speak to the condition of people in a real world an I've just come more and more deeply to be attached to what I wrote— that if we listen to the soul as it encounters the powers as the soul is ascending I think we can hear the clear voice of this psychic life and this is the psychic life of the soul, the life of the mind.
So the messages that conquer the powers I think are eloquent here; So these are the evil powers of ignorance and wrath and violence and injustice. “I do not belong to you, you do not know who I really am. You judge me by a false exterior. You don't see me, okay? You have no power over me. I have knowledge that is power to overcome your ignorance and violence. And I have been freed from your reach forever.”
That might be your point about the soul, right?
“You cannot continue to judge me wrongly. I have not done violence, rather violence has been done to me, and you, violence, you wrathful are destined for destruction, while I'm headed for rest and silence forever.”
And it seems to me that this is just suggesting to people that you have power and you have hope and hope is just huge and maybe that's one of the things that the sense of one is a spiritual person that can't be touched by whatever happens, whatever you can do to the body. And this is certainly one of the things that the martyrs talk about, is this, “You can't touch me.”It's a strong statement that I find very moving.
Dale Wright: It's powerful. Yeah. And those are amazing lines. Those jumped out at me.
Karen King: Paraphrase of what I think that the soul is saying.
Dale Wright: And what we're trying to say to ourselves, right. That all of the negativity that I cultivate in the world—it's not me, or at least I don't want that to be me. I strive to be other than that.
Karen King: It's also that what's out there and telling me who I am is lying to me. And somehow that the cultivation of the spirit is about a cultivation of discernment of what is truth and what is a lie.
Dale Wright: The use of the word “soul”—it's a word that we don't know how to use anymore, we contemporary people, but which would be a shame to lose so powerful and important a word in not just in Western culture, in human culture. What do you make of it? Is there a way to think about it that makes it palatable to us? Or are we better off just letting that one go and using other terms to describe what we, what we want to get at?
Karen King: I use it a lot. I talk about it. I used to think, “Oh, you can't do it because we don't know what it means anymore.” And some of the things we just don't believe anymore, but we need a word that somehow encapsulates what's important. About life and the living that is beyond the sum total of all of the material motions and synopses and parts no matter how complicated and interesting they are that we attach value and to which we greet with respect and dignity—the sum total of a whole bunch of material things moving around my body and so it doesn't command, doesn't suggest that it needs to be dealt with, with respect or with dignity or with kindness. Kindness.
So I think the word soul for me invokes that. And so if we're going to give up that word, then I want to know what other word we're going to use, what other concept, what other idea…
Dale Wright: Has that power, that history… not happening.
It's so interesting because Buddhism comes along as a critique of Hinduism, not Hinduism, but early Brahmanism, and where the focus is atman, the soul.
And so Buddhists come along and say, The Buddha says, Anatman, no soul, right? And meaning…who knows what it means. It's been debated through the history of Buddhism, but meaning, for many people, you are part of a larger process.
Everything comes, everything goes, everything's born. Everything dies and that's the same for you and everything about you. Don't immortalize yourself. Don't take yourself to be needing to protect yourself through all eternity. Now do your role here and live your part in this process and don't substantialize, don't harden the concept of your soul.
As part of you that you can't ever find a soul that will somehow be immortal and go to heaven. So there's this Buddhist critique of that, which, in a way disallows the use of that word.
But the great, contemporary Buddhist thinker, Stephen Batchelor—a friend of mine —I started to use the word “soul” in writings about Buddhism and I'm sure many people said “What? You can't, there's no soul,” you know, taking all this literally— He can spin out a way to understand your historical temporary essence as being your soul. That's who you are, who you've come to be through all of your acts. That's your spirit and it will live on beyond you but in a different form.
So even in Buddhism, there may be hope for the word soul, although I've yet to be able to figure out how I can use it.
Karen King: A text like the Gospel of Mary talks about the mind as existing between soul and spirit.
So it's playing around with what the self is, as the soul mind spirit. Okay. When it talks at the very end about at the end of the rise of the soul—I'm looking for the text to get the language right—it says:
“What binds me has been pierced, what surrounds me has been nullified. My desire,” —which of course is the negative thing— “has been brought to an end and ignorance has died. In a world I was set loose from a world and by a type from a type which is above, and from the chain of forgetfulness which exists only temporarily. From this hour on, I will receive rest from the time from the due season from the age in silence.”
And then Mary is silent. And I'm wondering what it's imagining there, does that start to come closer to what a Buddhist notion would be?
Dale Wright: Yeah, maybe, that's really interesting. I don't know how to differentiate.
Was it mind, soul and spirit? Those words, to pick them apart. If they're separate words and they're used, this one's used in this occasion, you have to really work on figuring. But it's wonderful to have that flexibility to be able to think of the mental spirit as really from three sides.
Karen King: I am constantly intrigued by the the escape from temporality. You know, I mean you may remember we taught this course on time as an undergraduate course. So it's always intrigued me, time, it's never ceased. And here's the sense that once you've overcome all of the, the ignorance and the violence and the wrath and everything, that somehow what you get is temporality.
Slips away, it's gone.
Dale Wright: Well, in the same way that in the text, the lines about the souls are sent into silence and rest beyond time and eternity. I mean, that's amazing to think about the 19th century in Europe, people like Freud and Nietzsche began to think of that as in fact a death wish that you want total silence, you don't want to hear anything. You don't want there to be any change in reality, that's temporality. You don't want to put forth any effort, you just want total rest. Are we picturing heaven as utter, total, eternal death.
Karen King: That makes me wonder if they were all extroverts, you know? They don't like the introvert mode of things.
Dale Wright: Let me out of here.
Karen King: Just being silent in a way.
Dale Wright: But it’s such an interesting thought. Other people are picturing heaven as a place where everything's great, the food's terrific, dancing maidens, oh my god. You know, it's not like temporality and stuff.
We're in the midst of a blissful temporality and it' not restful at all. Things are just good. So that's quite different.
Karen King: . Well, and of course, where Christianity or some strands of Christianity come down is in a bodily resurrection, creation of the new world, and really a fleshly, bodily, immortal afterlife with bodies that don't die, don't suffer, don't die, aren't ill, etc. So that also belongs to the very strongly to the Christian tradition.
Dale Wright: Yeah. And which strands of Christianity reject that resurrection of the body? Do you recall? Who doesn't go for that?
Karen King: Well, the Gospel of Mary is one. Okay. Arguably the Valentinians.
It's a little hard to go through what they believe. But there are a set of folks who really think that Jesus did come in the flesh, he did die, he did suffer but in order to show us that the body's not the self. So you find that in a text, like the letter to Peter to Philip.
So there are different notions of what the resurrection is or that even in the New Testament Paul talks about the transformation of the body. You know, from one glory to another so you've had the perfect glorious body, he says flesh and blood won't inherit the kingdom of God.
Well, they've had to work with that one when you get to this notion of a fleshly resurrection, what is the body? It's not flesh. So it's arguably right there in Paul, although that would be heretical to suggest such a thing, which is why you need a creed to make sure you don't misread the text, saying something that it says. Dale Wright: How does the Eastern Orthodox Church come out on that one?
Karen King: No I'm not going to go there. I just don't have…
Dale Wright: I'm sure within that tradition, it's complicated beyond since it's not just one thing. It's not the Eastern Church so much as many branches.
I think we should let you go. You've been utterly wonderful. As always, I love our conversation.
Karen King: This is so fun.
Dale Wright: Yeah. Yeah. Let's hang up and do it again.
Karen King: Thank you so very much. This was really fun.
Dale Wright: Do you have any comments or thoughts at the end?
Krzysztof: Professor King, if you have maybe two minutes to do a lightning round, I have one question. I'm hoping the way I'm thinking of it is that it's playful and imaginative rather than scholarly.
As I was listening, I was just imagining Nietzsche sitting in the bar and then you walk in and you happen to sit down next to him and he's in one of his moods as he's wont to be in and he turns to you and says, yeah, “The word Christianity is already a misunderstanding. In reality, there has only been one Christian and he died on the cross.” How do you reply? What do you say to this disgruntled gentleman based on everything that you understand and know?
Karen King: So my first thought was Jesus didn't know he was a Christian. He thought he was a Jew. So that might be the first thing I would say to Nietzsche. But then after that, I would say if people claim to be Christian, they can only do that as an aspiration, not as something that's real. That to be like Christ is the aspiration. And yes, you're probably right. Nobody's quite made it. Nobody has become the incarnation of God on earth. No one has been the physical manifestation of divine love. No one else is the light of the world.
Dale Wright: And certainly not you, Friedrich.
Karen King: And not me either.
Krzysztof: Oh, that's such a wonderful, wonderful response.
Thank you. It was a real pleasure listening to both of you talk and I really hope we get to do more of this.
Dale Wright: Yes. We'd love to invite you back, Karen. Thanks so much. Your store of knowledge just blows me away. Your understanding of an enormous world is just so rich.
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Welcome Friends. Today we send you a special treat, a chance to hear Professor Karen King talk about the Gospel of Mary and its implications for our question—how to live. We recorded this conversation recently and have now divided it into two parts. We send you Part I today and the concluding section soon thereafter. We introduce Karen in the video below and know that you’ll find her discussion of this important ancient text profoundly intriguing. All best wishes from Fire Philosophy.
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This is a conversation with the poet Joanna Klink about her poem sequence "The Infinities" from her collection The Nightfields.
We discuss the tangles of poetry and language, how and why to consider becoming less efficient, how to appreciate loss, and how to be more intimate with our lives.
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The recorded video conversation below with Professor Agnes Callard focuses on the experience of aspiration in life—what it means to aspire to a form of life beyond your current state. For many years this has been a topic of focal interest for me, so the recent publication of Callard’s book, Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming drew me into her readership immediately. Agnes Callard is a renowned scholar and thinker at the University of Chicago who writes with great insight and clarity. In addition to her books, she has written for the New York Times and the New York Review of Books, as well as other widely read publications.
She was the featured subject of an article in The New Yorker in March of 2023, titled “Agnes Callard’s Marriage of the Minds.”
We write at firephilosophy.substack.com
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Fire Philosophers Dale Wright, Malek, and Krzysztof discuss John Keats's Negative Capability, Zen Meditation, and Nietzsche's guidance on Learning to See.
We write at firephilosophy.substack.com
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Professors Dale Wright, Malek Moazzam-Doulat, and Krzysztof Piekarski focus on questions on How to Live, how to give style to one's life, the great art, according to Nietzsche.
The conversation below is a response to Krzysztof’s initial substack post about his experience reading Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will.
This conversation features Nieztsche's two famous quotes about free will, and how our own views about it affect how we live our lives, for better or worse.
Get full access to Fire Philosophy: Nietzsche, Zen, and How to Live at firephilosophy.substack.com/subscribe
