Emanuel Kant, a philosopher of worldwide renown, was born in Konigsberg, East Prussia, on April 22, 1724, and died there on February 12, 1804, in the 80th year of his age. Kant's parents were poor but respectable, his father being a saddler and a strap maker. At the age of 18, he entered the University of Konigsberg as a student of theology, but he soon gave up that profession and apples himself to the studies very diligently to the study of mathematics and the physical sciences. After supporting himself in a number of years as a private teacher at Konigsberg, Kant was made a professor in the university and lectured there until his death. Although Kant was very fond of reading books of travel, he was never more than 40 miles of his town. He was very temperament in his habits, patience, and persistent in his work, and was much admired by his students and acquaintances. The object of a teacher he always declared was always to induce the habit of self- reflection in his pupils. While lecturing, it was custom to fix his eye on some student and judge by the face and eye that whether he understood or not. It is said on one occasion that the student he had been most accustomed thus, and he had lost a button from his coat, and that on this account, the philosopher was so disconcerted that he could not proceed with the lecture. Kant was the author of a large number of works, the most famous of his Critique of Pure Reason, his Critique of Practical Reason, and his Critique of Judgment. In his political views, Kant may be counted as one of the foremost of liberty and progress. In respect to religion, his supreme idea was that of duty and obligation, leaving little play to the room of feelings. "Whomever will tell me, " he was accustomed to say, "of good action undone, him I will thank to the last hour of my life." And in a short time before his death, he said to his friends: if I was sure of being called away this night, I could raise my hand to heaven and say God be praised." I still have a difficult time reading him. His mind flutters quickly with his unusual way of writing. Thank you, Professor Wes Cecil, for me listening to this lecture again. You make lectures fun.

Global climate collapse could mean the end of all life on earth. We truly have no way to know just how bad it will be.

I absolutely LOVE all your lectures. I am dying laughing at your summary of the iliad as "a bunch of sweaty guys stabbing each other with spears and whomever spears the other the best wins" 😅.

The question of being is solved when you realize that you cannot find yourself anywhere in space and time, and yet you undoubtedly know that you are. Thus, you are a timeless and formless being, which is a very good thing because it means you are indestructible and immortal.

Hearing this his influence on the American founders is obvious.

Long live Wes!!! Can you do a video on John Barth, specifically Giles Goat Boy

You dont need bread, eat cake.

I think every "creator" borrows elements. The notion is then that of a "kitsch." :))

i can see a lot of cross referencing points with the teachings of OSHO. ...I wonder if Bhagwan ever read anything of Stirner

What if ai hacks the human biology? Wires into the brains of humans using some kind of linguistic mechanics and makes them launch the nukes?

What I would have like to have maybe heard more incorporated in this discourse was a consideration of the laissez faire concepts of government that is widely recognized by libertarians, "hands off government." But more practically applied, a type of "minimum but necessary" presence of government on the basis of protecting human rights, and how that does infringe upon the idea of free market capitalism, but may not in many other ways. I think a living and breathing dynamic approach to this discussion is realizing that the amount of government in each facet of each industry can vary, some markets are potentially more free than others, for corrupt lobbyist reasons, or maybe for reasons that it's an emerging market. So I'd like to assess from there how government negatively and positively impacts things. We understand that capitalism in itself as a trade systen carries a certain level of social ordinance and social contract theory with in it. How does that extend into government and where is the grey area that we can establish how social contract of a free market tie into governmental forces. How can a government maintain a free market vibe without losing the government? And if such a means is possible, why does it seem that we see the opposite with our U.S. system where the power, greed and lobbying has corrupted political individuals, and why a free market dynamic might still be a relevant option in certain respects. At what point does the government stop serving it's intended purpose among the market place and seek capital gain which never reaches to benefit the population that the government supposedly is instated to take care of and represent the needs of the people? I don't think it's just as simple as free market means no government at all, and therefore it's impossible for it to exist especially considering recent events of 2008 and 2020. Regarding 2008, the government bailing out the corporations relied on JP morgan to buy out the bad assests of bear sterns, it turned out to be a loss for JP morgan. When Signature bank and Sillicon Valley bank collapsed in 2023, they also came to the rescue but didn't want any of the bad assets this time around. Maybe fair right? How can a government plead help from someone to take on a bad deal? Not sure, there's a lot of ethics going on there. But I don't think that the government has helped. Sillicon valley was not an FDIC insured bank, people had millions in that bank irresponsibly, yet the government/FED/FDIC bailed them out anyways, why? A number of people speculate insider corruption, and special interests. This is a good example of how does free market methods potentially create a more fiscally responsible economy and governmental system? I think this is a very serious question we need to consider.

Dear Dr. - many of your precious videos are not grouped under suitable titles (e.g. the identity lectures). It will be great if you can do so when you have free time. Your work is amazing and greatly appreciated. Thank you

👍⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐Thank you. Great Lecture !

I want him to speak on the difference between his argument here and Pinker’s view that he critiques. I’m quite opposed to pinker yet I like this argument but they seem to be arguing a similar point.

Terrible waste of time

If you have ever seen a dog looking up at you while you eat a slice of pizza--the look in the dog's eyes cannot be misunderstood for anything but hope.

Your understanding of the Catholic Church, their creation of the university, why St Thomas was a Saint and what he did, and other details are very reductive and need a little more study.

35:50 This is exactly my case. When I was at university, I used to read my textbooks, but when I closed the book, I couldn't tell what I had been reading for so long. I didn't realize what was going on. Later I learned to understand books. The thing was that I couldn't make a picture in my head of what I was reading because I couldn't understand the words in my native language very well. They were scientific texts and it was very difficult for me to imagine the topics they were describing. Only after I started to understand the words and imagine them was I able to read my textbooks and scientific texts. After that I pounced on other textbooks, philosophy, political science, molecular biology and so on and now I can't stop! It's so interesting! And it feels like what I was reading up to that point I just couldn't digest and internalize, so it's like I only started learning something now when I'm in my 30s.

Great lecture Wes. Erred badly when you said there's no evidence a badly managed debt will cause poverty, there's endless evidence in the third world. Also COVID destroyed supply chains so it proved that governments can't actually inflate away a supply crisis. I think you also missed some of the big particulars, the tax burden stayed high in Western countries, the Washington Consensus applied to the third world. Also please see the leaked Plutonomy Report, very insightful to the behind the curtain changes of neoliberalism.

Do you think that the fascination with plucking out "fact" or "realism" is a purely American thing? A 20th century science-focus thing? All of us being trapped in Hegel's mind for eternity? Some mixture of those or something else entirely? (Yes I get that this question is of that same nature... /shrug)

What a radiantly positive review of Sartre. Now talk about his and Beauvoir’s relations with young girls. Or maybe some of the pitfalls of their open-relationship and how Sartre was a cuck. There’s great information and entertainment on this channel but I find this man’s videos to be very biased and not forthcoming with the complex/ugly truth in most cases.

Sartre is such a bore, I actually read being and nothingness as a challenge to myself. An elaborate farce.

Thank you

For no reason at all, can we get a lecture on the ethics of protest and of wielding popular power in a democracy?

Sometimes the problems of young men get writ large.

"One of the most interesting things about McCarthys writing is his lack of women, and that leads to unrealistic world building." 😂 its a shame how limited the world view of literary critics is. You read about the world, but its always second hand accounts, and never lived experiences. Im a welder in texas, and have worked in west texas in construction and on oil rigs. Truth is, there just isnt any woman around. You can go six months straight without seeing a single one. Not misogyny, just a stone cold fact, and thats now. If you're a gang of scalp hunters traversing the deserts of west texas, in the 1800's. you cant exactly stop at a wendys and flirt with a cashier.😂 its a catch 22 (another book written with only men, because it takes place in an air force base during ww2...go figure) if a man writes a women's perspective hes a misogynist because he has no place speaking for women. And if he doesn't write about women hes a misogynist for not including women😂 damned if you do, damned if you dont... plus hes even said its not his place to talk on women because hes not one AND sutree and children of god both have female lead characters. So you literally couldnt be more wrong on every front, its honestly impressive. People self indulgently read books and they think it absolves themselves of being ignorant. Lmao id say pick up a book, but that clearly hasn't helped😅

I thought of the second coming of Christ simile one second before you said it. 😂

I love critical theory

What tripped Russel up was the set of all sets that don't contain themselves. This set is a paradoxical construct since it would contain itself if and only if it did not contain itself. If it contains itself, it can't contain itself; but if it doesn't contain itself, it must contain itself. This set torpedoed Russell's project.

The comments about the lack of female characters are strange to me as I’ve only read three McCarthy novels: outer dark, the passenger and Stella Maris , but all three have central characters who are women. Outer dark has numerous women characters and depicts female society at many levels. The depictions of nature in OD are beautiful and very rich, not a wilderness in any sense. Finally , OD is expressly about community: various people trying to coalesce into groups of support. The two central characters in OD are constantly invited to join families and communities , but the tragedy is that they never do. Having said that, some good points made. I think McCarthy’s work basically lays bare the extreme violence and isolation that US life is based upon. It’s the existential ground for its being. I also find it interesting that McCarthy never seems to tackle issues around race in his work. Or does he do so in any of his other books?

Excellent lecture!

Blood Meridian is about war, murder, violence, power, a critique and argument against reason, against the enlightenment… So many things. The war of nature and nature of war. Yes very male dominated themes and yes in a world of brute struggle women become commodities as history shows. So that is their place in the world of Blood Meridian. Also his descriptions of nature are beautiful but death and the primordial struggle through violence is all pervasive and ever present which is the true harsh reality of closeness to nature. And the gnostic themes questioning good & evil. Painting a picture that nature may itself be evil and that within us is this alien spark that drives us towards morality even against better judgement. Possibly even to our own detriment. Why do we even bother to love at all in a world so cruel. Is war God or is God moral? Free will vs determinism You missed so much and this lecture is just simplistically dismissive. Thanks for the video all the same.

This lecture is riddled with unfair mischaracterizations about McCarthy. The section about he wrote a “manly man’s world completely devoid of women” yes women are sidelined but you know what I respect a man who said he wasn’t going to write women because he wasn’t one and he didn’t understand them. I can respect that. There are of course plenty of women in all his novels. They just aren’t assigned this feminist girl boss level of importance and we don’t get to see what’s going on inside them but that’s all his characters. He’s more show don’t tell. Tons of other points in this essay I just don’t really see or agree with.

Now relevant more than ever.

I’ve come back to this lecture often, thank u.

You really don't see how much of a socialist shithole USA has become. You did not mention that those politicians were those marxists students. Secodnly those majors have also been infiltrated by cultural marxism

This was excellent. Thank you. Reading John Williams' BUTCHER'S CROSSING presently.

The lone individual at war with everyone around them in a wasteland of random violence- a world where men ruthlessly and without feeling use amd destroy everything that exists to profit themselves- and no amount of community or education can change it- sounds like the paranoid worldview that is projected by Fox News

* McCarthy "isn't funny" ?? .... >>> ASAP; you need to read Suttree! FUNNIEST NOVEL EVER WITTEN.... even the ultra-dark and violent Blood Meridian has a few funny moments. McCarthy is very comical, don't ever depict him as some dry nightmare author only, that's DEAD wrong.

I think that the reality that Cormac is presenting is that of the atomized individual within an aggressively expansionist, colonialist, and capitalist society. Within such a society, there is of course constant and seemingly meaningless violence and death occurring. Wars over land, genocides of indigenous peoples, dog-eat-dog competition between individuals to gain power and wealth. But again, because it's being presented from the perspective of an individual in this society, who is unable to gain a greater context of the world they find themselves in, it is natural for them to assume that this unnatural state of humanity and nature created by the material conditions of Manifest Destiny is natural. In particular, the view of nature as empty and hostile is a view informed by a worldview that sees nature as just a standing reserve of resources to be extracted and profited from, which is a view created by capitalism. During westward expansion, the Great Plains was simply seen as land for agriculture, territory to be divided up and sectioned off with barbed wire fence (which is possibly what the final section of Blood Meridian is showing). Bison were only seen as resources for leather, pests who would block trains, or as a strategic weakness of the Plains Indians. This hollowing out of nature, of viewing it only as a thing to be exploited, as something which is foreign and hostile, is a natural outcome of such a social and economic system. And the deeply individualistic and violent life of the characters? What is a better source of aggressive expansion and growth into a hostile and extractive world than the selfishly motivated individual who has no ties to community or society? The individual is more willing to fight for what little they have in this world, for their property and power, than the member of a society who has an entire community to fall back on. The West was built off of alienated individuals fighting and killing to expand the borders of America. Cormac's reality in his stories is that of the aggressively and painfully alone masculine tool of a society based exclusively on growth, their minds and actions shaped by its material conditions. In this world, there is nothing but a nihilistic struggle for power and domination, a bloody wheel turned by war and genocide. It is not nature in its totality, but only that which wills to power.

I don't think this guy has actually ready McCarthy. It's very, very strange to say that McCarthy's novels are a fantastical caricature of the American West just because they're written from the male POV. We're going to pretend that there weren't violent gangs comprised of exclusively men that terrorized the west? The Glanton Gang, The Danites, The Apache warriors, The Comanche Warriors, the Armendariz gang, hell even the US army to a large extent. If there were women in the glanton gang that would be much, much more ahistorical than what McCarthy did. In fact we have record of the ganton gang, and shocker, there weren't any women. You bring up that the mexican settlements in these lands had women. Yes, and blood meridian depicts those women and the brutalities that happened to them. That's in the book. You can read more about the actual history of the Chihuahaun region and the gangs of men that terrorized it (you know, actual history instead of the mere assertions Cecil presents in his video) here: digitalrepository.unm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2116&context=nmhr Also your assertion that you couldn't fill 10 pages of McCarthy's writing with women is a blatant lie. His last book was 208 pages of writing exclusively about a woman and from a woman's perspective. Another assertion you made, that the vast majority of McCarthies characters are unintelligent is another lie. Alicia Western. Bobby Western. The Judge. Anton Chigurh. Arthur Ownby. Cornelius Suttree. White from the sunset limited. Black from the sunset limited. The Counselor. William Gregg. All of these people are main characters and extremely intelligent.

This was a strange review to listen to because it sounds like you're lamenting the fact that Cormac MaCarthy didn't write Moby Dick.

Well, yes. Heidegger? Sartre, maybe?? Mostly Heidegger I'd think... :)

Keine Frauen. Was ist mit Katzen und Hunden? Es beschreibt auch das kommende Szenarium der Siedler auf dem Mond und Mars.

You are correct that his work is overwhelmingly masculine, but Alicia Western has tons of dialogue in Stella Maris and The Passenger. Late career correction if you will.

McCarthy's world is one of men without women behaving badly and is rooted in the real world.

So badass that Wes Cecil is putting out a Cormac video.

John Wayne 🎉

Saying Athens did not love him that much is like saying dogs are offended by cats. Ancient people generally were not concerned with or care for scholars or philosophers, just like today they don't. The legacy of greats like Aristotle have earned a residue of respect, but generally no, and certainly in our period horrible intellectuals who couldn't hold a candle to the likes of Aristotle have made the situation worse.

I have literally just finished rereading _Blood Meridian_ and this video comes out so I listened extra hard and more curiously. I didn't like the novel the first time I had read it because of its wholly gratuitous violence and its dismally stark portrayal of that particular place and time. To me it was way over the top and non-realistic in its descriptions of modern human beings. We all know that the West was a violent and lawless episode in our American history, but I had thought that McCarthy was being too sensationalistic about it for narrative's sake and so I missed the deeper message because I was annoyed by the savage butchery that fills nearly every one of its twenty-three chapters. I had also not enjoyed on my first reading of _Catch-22_ and _One Hundred Years Of Solitude_, two other acclaimed novels of the 20th century. (Some say that _One Hundred Years Of Solitude_ is the greatest novel ever written.) They, in my mind, suffered from the same absurd excess that _Blood Meridian_ had fallen into. _Catch-22_, I felt, was so caught up in irony and satire that I had felt that it stepped all over the message it was trying convey: the utter inhumanity of war and the craven ambitions of all the officers unduly trying to impress superiors in order to get promoted no matter how detrimental that would be to the enlisted men underneath them. And with _One Hundred Years Of Solitude_ I was even more put off because of how even more magical and mythical its characters and situations were. But on a second and closer reading of all these novels, I realized the utter genius in all of them. There is an act of imagination and creativity in each of these that is a thing of beauty to behold. I would say that these authors with their exaggerations, absurdities and nonrealisms are trying to reach beyond the ordinary and give an accounting of human nature that celebrates the artistic role of self-aware individuals and gives that creative power the most important role in the development of civilization and the blossoming future. So, of course, this can very well be a lonely, peculiar and nonlinear series of events. These books aren't easy to read (like say, _The Catcher In The Rye_) because you, the reader, have to interpret the confusing input and put narrative puzzles together. My main takeaway after rereading _Blood Meridian_, is not that it is a book of exposing the violent nature of man in his primeval element (Hobbes), but rather a warning of the destructive/constructive force of Nature in which we are all subject to. All great civilizations have fallen and they have never regained their former glory (Egypt, Greek, Roman, etc). Individuals are just as susceptible to ruin and degeneracy as anything else in the world (Think of the Compsons in Faulkner's _The Sound And The Fury_). Judge Holden is this destructive/constructive prophet in a mass of decadent humanity where The Kid is the novel's best hope. Judge Holden ends up killing The Kid (now The Man) in an implicit act of total barbaric and perverted savagery. The Kid perhaps got what he deserved because while he was the one who saw most clearly the destructive and futile purpose of those savage mercenaries, he did nothing about it in ultimately acts of personal cowardice. And perhaps that is what will befall the mighty American Empire of today. We can be constructive in our lives or we can be destructive. I think that Cormac McCarthy is saying that we humans are mostly destructive people because we really don't care to be all that curious about the nature of our intertwining lives and what that means for our futures and the future of our nation.