William Egginton

Welcome to the Puck Venture Capital and Beyond, the show that examines the changing landscape of our world. We'll have candid conversations with VCs, entrepreneurs, and thought leaders grappling with our current challenges and providing solutions to key problems we face as a nation. I'm Jim Beer, president of CMBG Advisors. This podcast brings change makers to the table to discover the inner workings behind their decision making strategies and ultimately how they got to where they are today. This is unfortunately the situation we find ourselves in as a society and more and more as a world today, where we've sifted ourselves into different groups geographically.

We've sifted ourselves by marrying the same kinds of people, by having children and keeping them apart from the children who have different views. And bit by bit, no one within those groups or between those groups talk to each other. The algorithms on the internet platforms that we use to communicate, they exacerbate those divisions, so we're only hearing news from the people that we already agree with. We're doubling down, tripling down, quadrupling down on this idea that the reality that's out there, we don't really need to discover it. We don't really need to be open to it because we already know what it is.

We're already sure about it and ourselves. Hello, Puck listeners. While we often discuss big ideas on the show, we have rarely dealt overtly with philosophy. Now some of you who took an intro course in college may be taking out your headphones, and I don't blame you. But a month ago, a friend recommended one of his favorite books of 2023, a book called The Rigor of Angels, Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality.

After beginning with slight trepidation, I devoured the book. And so today, I have the distinct pleasure of sitting down with the author of that book, William Egnanton, the Decker Professor in the Humanities and the director of Alexander Grass Humanities Institute at Johns Hopkins University. Bill has written numerous books and written for various publications exploring the intersection of philosophy, literature, and science. Our conversation covers quite a bit, so without further ado, let's get to it. William Egginton, welcome to the Puck.

We are excited to have you here today, and I will say that The Rigor of Angels, one of your recent books, was what introduced me to your writings. But then I had an opportunity to explore it, and I was fascinated. And so as we move into this interview today, let's talk about your personal journey and how you became interested in the intersection of literature, philosophy, and culture, and welcome to the Puck. Jim, thank you so much for having me on the Puck. It's really a a delight for me to be here, and thanks for that question.

Thanks too for mentioning the book and finding me. I'm really delighted that we have the opportunity intersections between humanities, philosophy, literature, and and science, in this case, theoretical physics. It's a series of or collection, I should say, of interest that I've had for a long, long time. You know, when I was a kid, I was very into math. I was very into physics.

I was very into science, and I moved around a lot. So a lot of my time was when I wasn't meeting new people or was at a new place, I had my books with me. I had some animals in the house, some cats usually, and my books, chemistry set, science magazines, and that was a lot of how I spent my time. And as that interest grew, physics and mathematics is one of the areas that I really expanded into. When I got to college, I had already, you know, been reading a lot.

I was a huge reader. When I got to college, I, had the opportunity, I was at Dartmouth, to, start taking literature and philosophy courses. And those kind of hit me like a ton of bricks, changed my world. I just got sucked into all these major questions, but I probably had already developed a certain set of of ways of thinking that had been influenced by all the math and science that I've been doing, and those stuck with me. So I took a long detour where I was studying comparative literature, adding to the languages that I knew.

I grew up bilingual speaking Spanish and English, having grown up for a little time in in Bogota, Colombia. And there I was then at this at this nexus, at this intersection of having been reading a lot of literature, studying literature and philosophy, but having this interest a deep interest in science and in particular cosmology and physics. And I started, teaching courses over the years that would trace that history, that would go back into the deep history of how humans have thought about their place in the cosmos, have tried to understand planetary motion, what space and time are, what's the relationship of the human spirit to these things, what What is the relation between big theological questions, like the question of the existence of God? How do you explain the creation ex nihilo of everything that is? And I realized that so many of those questions are still the questions that we're asking today from a rationalist perspective, from a scientific perspective, from an empirical perspective.

But they're still dealing with, at the biggest level in cosmology, the same fundamental problems. Right? How do you conceptualize the birth of everything that is out of nothing? What does it mean to say that a universe was born at a moment in time? I think people, when they think about that, they that's a head scratching moment.

Well, if it was born in a moment in time, what was happening before it was born? Well, this is not new. Theologians have been asking these these kinds of questions for years and years and years. And so as I started presenting these questions as questions to students in college settings, I was finding that they were having the same kind of, you know, brain explosions in a good sense that, I've been having my entire life. And communing with students over those mind expanding moments has been it's my favorite thing.

It's my favorite thing in the world. And so moving into the book, that's why I spent the last five years writing a book that I had spent twenty five to thirty years thinking about and conceptualizing. That's amazing. I mean and dealing with science is overwhelming enough for a lot of people. But when you start combining it with philosophy, religion, humanities, you're putting a lot together and a reason why I was excited to have this conversation.

As we move into this and we go into some of these intersections, let's talk about your background in Spanish and Latin American literature and how that influenced your approach to philosophy in the humanities. Absolutely. So like I mentioned, I spent time when I was very young growing up in Colombia. My mother is was born in The United States, but herself grew up in Venezuela. Her sisters, were born in Venezuela.

So that side of the family always had this very strong connection to South America. I lived in Bogota, Colombia until I was five years old. We moved back to The States and moved around a lot and, hence, sort of this needing to take my own enrichment along with me. But I did grow up bilingual as a result and was always interested in languages and exploring the world. And first, it was the the Spanish and Latin American, you know, side of things.

When I was in high school, I, I was an exchange student and I went to Quito, Ecuador. I explored the Inca ruins in Cuenca. I, hitchhiked around the country as a 16 year old and had really extraordinary eye opening experiences there, hung out with people on the beaches of Guayaquil, all as a 16 year old. And this is this is the kind of stuff that really makes you grow in leaps and bounds, I think. Then in, in college, as I was doing this, you know, creating my own major at Dartmouth in what's called comparative literature, As I was going in that direction, I had these opportunities to do portions of my undergraduate work in different countries, and I took full advantage.

It's what's called at Dartmouth, the Dartmouth plan or the d plan, and it allows you in four quarters in any year to spend a good number of them not in Hanover to go to different places. And I studied at the University of Lyon in France. I went back as a teaching assistant on that program, so I was building up a third language there in French. I studied Italian as well. I went to Central America during the years of what's called the Ofensiva in the Salvadoran, civil war.

I crossed the border in the middle of that summer to Guatemala. In fact, to get away from the civil war in El Salvador. I ended up teaching in a university as an assistant teacher of English and in a private school in Guatemala and ended up writing an undergraduate honors thesis that was on the topic of the poetics of political violence. So I was meeting with poets, reading their poetry, and and asking the question, how do people whose entire lives and upbringing have been wounded to the core by generations of war and violence? How do they filter that and and attempt some kind of a cure of themselves in their society through language, through poetry?

And so I wrote that. After that, I went and I moved to, Spain. I was really interested in Spain as well. One of my, study abroad had been there in Salamanca. I moved to Madrid, which was a spectacular happening city in the late eighties and nineteen nineties.

When I was, there, I moved back. I worked kind of just scraping together translating and teaching gigs. And during that time, I finally decided, well, you know what? This is the life of the mind. This is what I wanna do.

And so I I started applying to literature programs, and that's what got me into. First, with a focus, Spanish and Latin American literature, and then eventually a PhD in comparative literature where I integrated my interests and and abilities in French, Italian, and German as well. With this background and traveling from the time you're 16 and dealing with science and dealing with philosophy and the humanities, you also write about the defense of religious moderation, and you argue for a bridge between religious fundamentalism and atheism. What specific events or revelations inspired you to explore that, And what impact do you hope that that perspective will have on our discussions as a society? So here's the reason.

That was a book I think I wrote in around 2010, and it was in direct response to kind of cluster of very popular books that came out at the time that became known as the authors became known as the new atheists. There were Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens. Those were the kind of the three big ones. And I remember being quite disgruntled with their work and feeling that this was a really head on attack on the very dignity of a huge number, the vast majority of people alive in the world and quite frankly, the even vast majority of people who've ever lived who do tend to have spiritual experiences, spiritual beliefs, religious practices, and can't be painted with a single toned brush the way that these authors were and and denigrated, quite frankly, as they were. I I thought it there was a lack of historical sensitivity in the sense that they they a failure to see that the perspective that they were in their own minds attempting to defend of atheism or of kind of radical secularism was such a small blip in human history that to have the kind of arrogance to presume that this is correct and without any doubt in their minds and that everything else in the history of humanity and the 99% of the people around the world living today are all somehow numbskulls and idiots for not seeing it their way.

It just struck me as extraordinarily arrogant. And it struck me as evincing in particular the same kind of foolproof certainty that I saw in one of the truly great dangers that I continue to see today, which is fundamentalism. And so what what I argued in that book is really quite simple and straightforward argument. But the problem is not what one believes, it's how one believes it. That when one sort of armors oneself with this foolproof, absolute certainty that you have access to the ultimate way things are, whether it's a religious credo or it's a purportedly scientific one, you're not behaving empirically.

You're certainly not behaving in a way that the history of science has, has led to its greatest discoveries. And in fact, you're behaving in ways that are very similar, whether it's religious fundamentalism or atheistic fundamentalism. And so I said in that book, really, that kind of thinking, the majority of which, sure, there's more religious fundamentalists than atheist fundamentalists in the world. But in a highly developed, you know, post industrial society like ours, having those attitudes as an atheist, like those three, thinkers and many others like them do, produces precisely the same kind of problem. So the problem is fundamentalism and disbelief that you have access to the ultimate way things are, what I call in that book, the code of codes, the underlying message that's gonna you've already interpreted it.

It doesn't matter. Anything else. You, you know, interpretation, conversation, listening to other people, none of this matters anymore because you kind of already have the answer to everything. So that was the argument in that book. Well, you're saying a lot, which is again that there's different ways that people see the world.

And when you get into this black and white place of certainty, it can create problems. And you as somebody that sees, I think, the gradations, the complexity, and can live in the world of paradox, you it sounds like head on a tactic. What was the feedback that you got? You know, in some ways, the feedback is, to to a certain extent, predictable that those who embrace that kind of thinking, that kind of absolute certainty that their position is unimpeachable, react in a belittling way. Right?

They say, oh, well, here's yet another one of these people who's touting different ways of knowing. They say it with sort of a sneer in their voice or referring to me as in kind of really questionable historical analogies as sort of a collaborationist that I'm somehow offering, abating and abetting the worst in in humanity by kind of giving some sort of a past or religious belief. But you had asked before also what were the influences or what were the experiences that led me to to have that kind of respect for different forms of belief. And I really do believe it's internationalism. It's, having lived in different cultures, having traveled in different cultures, having had so many conversations with deeply empathic and reasonable and insightful people who also had religious beliefs.

And some of them scientists, quite frankly, and some of them very successful scientists, and some of them with religious beliefs that I couldn't imagine myself having. But I could certainly have terrific conversations about big questions, be they ethical, moral, be they cultural, be they scientific, despite the fact that they purportedly had this completely different world view. So what I I realized is we believe in different registers, that our beliefs are not all necessarily propositional in the in the same form that I say, you know, I believe it is raining outside. I can go out and and verify that empirically right now. There's all sorts of beliefs that don't have that structure, that are beliefs that could be about fictional characters in the world, beliefs that could be about moral values, beliefs that are about taste, aesthetic pleasures.

None of these are verifiable empirically in the exact same way that, that statements about the weather outside right now are. And yet they're extremely important to us. One could even arguably say so many of them are even important, more fundamental than the most obvious empirically verifiable statement. So it's kinds of belief in the diff we can we are perfectly capable of holding multiple beliefs, even ones that appear to compete with each other on certain levels because our brains are complex and we require that kind of complexity in the sort of world that we've created for ourselves. So with that background, I think we can shift into talking a little bit about the rigor of angels.

And what I find fascinating is that we all are in our own bubble. We all see the world according to our own nature and nurture and our perspective. And the question is, how do you open yourself up to awe and wonder and another way to look at things? And how do you challenge this kind of black and white thinking people have? And it seems to me that you, in your own way, attack that through the rigor of angels, and you choose Borges, Heisenberg, and Kant to discuss in the rigors of angels.

And what connections did you find among their perspectives on reality that led you to to attack this issue in this way? That's really a great way of framing the question because it is a question about very things that you and I have been talking about right now, about having a underlying belief that the world must be in a certain way. And what I found over years and years, as I mentioned before, of of teaching courses, obviously, of reading and thinking about these things, teaching courses to students about the history of science alongside history of cosmology and of our imaginative efforts to figure out what kind of beings we are in the cosmos. I ended up focusing on three figures, and I wanted those three figures. I had a lot of choices.

I mean, there's tons of people whose thought in different ways were, are, and and could have been central to a book of this topic. And I thought about you know, I came up with scheme after scheme of how I could write this book. But these three popped out. And why these three? One thing, one criterion that I had in mind is I wanted this to be a book in which the main protagonists were really very different, that they came from completely different backgrounds, not necessarily cultural backgrounds, although that, you know, that helps as well, that they could be historically different as in the case of of Kant and the other two, that they could be geographically different, Borges coming from the complete other side of the world than the other two.

But most important to to me was that they represented different, what we would call today, disciplines, what Kant would have called in his time faculties. This is ways of organizing knowledge, sort of the the principles that you lay down when you study the world in in a different way. And I thought to myself, in fact, the original subtitle of the book had not mentioned their names, had said a poet, a physicist, a philosopher, and the ultimate nature of reality. So that was what kind of stuck with me, a triangle of kinds. And I was certainly influenced in the structure, at least the idea of this by a great book written at this point.

It's probably more than thirty years ago by Hofstadter that many of your listeners may know as well, which is Godel Escher Bach, which did a similar, you know, was he's thinking about the nature of cognition and consciousness and doing so by bringing together three artists, producers, makers in different realms. In his case, you know, a great mathematician, a great sketch artist in in Escher, and and one of the greatest musicians of all time in Bach. So, I mean, the similarities pretty much end there. But that really stuck with me and struck me as what an interesting way to dive into a problem, a problem that's bigger in itself than any of these individuals, but that somehow triangulating three thinkers, writers, scientists in a way that brings these problems out would be so interesting. And in particular, I wanted to show that you can use a story writer like Borges to get into a philosophical problem and understand it better or to get into a scientific problem and understand it better.

That you can, in turn, have figured out what a great theoretical physicist like Werner Heisenberg was producing, the kind of insights into the relationship between the human knower and the world, and then turn around and use that to better explicate a complicated philosophical theory or really interesting but tough to understand story. Because I've been doing that for years in the classroom, in classroom settings where we read a story together or we read a work by Einstein or by Heisenberg together. And then we we work it out. We try and discuss its meaning. We bring them into conversation with each other, and and these sorts of insights come out.

So that's what ultimately led to the choice of these particular three. They were they had great life stories that I could dive into. I felt that I could use some of the grist of their life stories as a vehicle for in narrative nonfiction conveying some of the big philosophical ideas that I thought that they were wrestling with. And they formed this really nice, tight, very different, and yet somehow very convergent triangle. So I urge our listeners to read the book because it's wonderful.

Thank you. It's not light reading. I will caution people from that perspective. But if you wanted to just and and tied into the conversation we're having today, to give a little bit of a summary of what you were aiming for there, is there a way you could summarize that for our listeners? Absolutely.

I would say that sort of what makes these admirable characters despite all of their very flawed and interesting characters. But what makes them admirable as thinkers is what I call an uncommon ability to resist the temptation that so many other great thinkers have, that so many of us have to believe that we know God's secret plan for the universe. Right? That we have access to that code of codes. And we have it.

And like you and I were discussing before in our discussion as we as we talked about atheism and fundamentalism and the overlaps between the two. There's a natural human tendency. You could call it almost a confirmation bias to believe that the world as it is in itself out there must exist in more or less the shape that I sense it in right now. And sort of the way that that translates in scientific discourse, and this is, you know, where I think the really interesting debates that I talk about between Heisenberg and his side, if you will, of intellectual history and Albert Einstein and Irving Schrodinger and their side is that Einstein and Schrodinger couldn't get past this impulse to believe that the world in itself, as it really is down at the smallest level, had to be smooth, continuous, extended in space and time. This idea that was coming out of necessarily quantum mechanics that, you know, in the most famous formulation of it, that the path of an electron doesn't exist until you've observed it was incomprehensible to them.

They said this just doesn't make sense. It can't be true. You know? And and Einstein is very famous for these pithy formulations where he says that God doesn't play dice with the universe when he's talking about the probabilistic side of quantum mechanics. And Niels Bohr, one of the partisans of Heisenberg's discovery and in really ways, in many ways, it's great theorist.

He, at some point, just said in exasperation to Einstein, would you please stop telling God what to do? Alright. And there's this idea in the book, and this is the example that comes from the scientific side of it, but that all three of these thinkers are exploring in a different way that humans have a natural, almost tendency to let our extraordinary capacity for figuring the world out, run rampage over every possible limit to the point that we figure things out in the here and now and in time and space. And that's really amazing that we do that. But then we take the tools that we're using to figure them out, and we paint the rest of all reality outside the limits of all possible knowledge as somehow corresponding necessarily to the exact same form that we discover in nature itself.

Yeah. You know, what's fascinating to me in terms of the human mind is the challenge of trying to understand how rationality and nonlinear non rationality can coexist, kind of the left brain and the right brain. And what's fascinating to me is, you know, when people are struggling with their mortality and their their secularism and they're they're sad or they're feeling that life has a lack of meaning for them. And they're trying to find it in science and in the here and the now. And the paradox to me is that unless you're able to let go and realize there is something bigger than us, Mhmm.

You don't have the ability to kinda let go and somehow surrender to the ultimate dissolution, the ego when we die. And so we're constantly hiding from our mortality because by definition, if we only have rationality, we are only dust and ashes. We are no better than a worm. And ultimately, I think the human being has a very hard time living in that environment because the rational conclusion that is that life is somehow absurd, and yet we know intuitively from the poets and our own experience that there is a mystical magical side to life if we would only let go and explore that. That's exactly right.

I mean, the kind of approach to this that I find myself sort of most in tune with has been referred to as spiritual materialism. The great physicist and I think wonderful writer, Alan Lightman refers to this as well. He says, look, the kind of approach to awe and wonder that's so important, that's a driver of science as well as of art and creativity of all kinds. This does not require in any way. In fact, it's kind of the the opposite of a presumption of, you know, to go back to the vocabularies we were using before, a kind of ready set knowledge of what an immortal soul must be, a ghost in the machine, a kind of a Cartesian thinking substance that's indivisible and that inhabits the extended world in some way.

None of these are requirements. In fact, a spiritual materialism can perfectly well accept the notion that it to quote what you were just saying, that in some sense, yes, we are dust and energy, matter and energy, and some formulation of matter and energy. But guess what? Whatever that combination of matter and energy is, it also produces beauty, ecstasy, transcendent experience, the ineffable experiences of facing gorgeous artwork and being overcome by it, religious experience, all of these. And the fact that that somehow produced by the trillions of synapses in our in our brains doesn't mean that it's not real.

It doesn't mean that it's not worth spending an enormous amount of our attention exploring and going deeper and deeper into. Mhmm. Yeah. I completely agree. So let's move on to kind of current stuff and practicality, which is the world of identity politics that's obviously very prevalent in higher education right now.

How do you envision a return to the original goals of education and what role should the liberal arts play in achieving this? Yeah, that's a great question. Thank you. And I did write a book about this in 2018 called The Splintering of the American Mind, And it made the argument for the centrality, in fact, of what we're trying to do in a liberal arts education to becoming more fulfilled individuals, of course, but also socially minded members of a thriving polis to the centrality of what we do in higher education, what we should be doing in higher education, to a functioning democracy. Really, the opposite side of that is the impossibility of having a functioning democracy without discerning citizens who understand themselves as free intellectual agents, people with an ability to better themselves in the world, to use their tools of inquiry and discourse, to enter into conversations with each other.

And to recognize that these conversations can and at times even should be difficult, uncomfortable that we, in order to make progress in conversations, that we at times need to expose ourselves, expose parts of us that could be hurt, that it sometimes hurts to be disagreed with. My feeling is not, you know, just to say with, you know, a book that came out at the time as well that, oh, well, we're all behaving like coddled children. I'm not trying to say that. I do realize that, you know, there's there is a discourse out there that's trying to make that point. I think it is important to be respectful of one another, to understand that historic inequities persist in the present and that there is no such thing as kind of a free and open marketplace of ideas where everyone has is entering into the conversation on the same ground floor.

But in order to redress and to repair those past inequities, in order to find equitability and democracy within conversations, simply marking off different areas is unsayable and or saying that you just can't go there and creating more and more of a space where certain things just can't be talked about is really the opposite to solving the problem. And so part of what I'm trying to say is, you know, there's multiple things I'm trying to say in both my conversations on campus and today and in the book, The Splintering of the American Mind, is we have to be sure mindful of each other's feelings, but we also have to not hide things. We need to be able to talk. We need to be able to learn to reason. We need to be able to understand that evidence based arguments are important to hear even if you disagree with the point that's being made, because we're not going to get anywhere as a society.

I'm afraid we're showing ourselves more and more by refusing to talk or to, again, to go back to the thing we were saying before, to presume that we already know the answers to everything. And hence, you know, let's not even bother talking about that. Let's all shake our heads or nod our heads together in this little group over here where we see each other because we all agree and we all know the answers already. Where the other side of the state line over there, there's a whole group who are doing the exact same thing and also not talking to us. This is unfortunately the situation we find ourselves in as a society and more and more as a world today where we've sifted ourselves into different groups geographically.

We've sifted ourselves by marrying the same kinds of people, by having children and keeping them apart from the children who have different views. And bit by bit, no one within those groups or between those groups talk to each other. The algorithms on the Internet platforms that we use to communicate, they exacerbate those divisions. So we're only hearing news from the people that we already agree with. And again and again, to go back to this theme that you and I keep on talking about, we're doubling down, tripling down, quadrupling down on this idea that the reality that's out there, we don't really need to discover it.

We don't really need to be open to it because we already know what it is. We're already sure about it and ourselves. When you look at historical situations and times, were there periods where people recognized the value of this kind of dialect and as a result of that were more willing to embrace it? My sense is that there's always been undercurrents of a relatively minority position. And many and this is sort of one of the great things about literature in the sense of like those big kind of works that we sometimes refer to as great books.

Obviously, some of which may have noxious themes and certainly from our enlightened perspective today might be representing perspectives that we no longer as a whole would want to adopt. But so many of them which have lasted have lasted because there's something in them that reminds people when they read them, that reminds them of that inquisitive spirit. They're works of science, works of philosophy, works of literature that have a lasting power precisely because they undermine those certainties. They remind us that our existence is fragile. They remind us that we don't know everything before we begin our inquiry.

And because they've always been there, they've always served as a possible return, a point of return, a possible reminder to keep some kind of an openness going. Right? This this this critical undercurrent of society that is tends to be there. We can always turn to and we can revive it at any time. But in answer to your question, I think that at certain moments when people are the most anxious, when people are perhaps suffering the most times like ours, there's a great temptation to ignore those voices because those sorts of voices, they're not necessarily the most comfortable in the world.

Right? So precisely the time when we would need not to be comforted, when we would need to be challenged to expand outside of our borders is often the most difficult time to do that. And again, paradox. When we're in the darkness. Right?

We want we need to get to the light. We've gotta keep looking for new ways to get through that maze. And yet, you know, if we panic, it's it reminds me of a, story. If you put a cage on the ground, the bird will walk into the cage through this little pathway. And if you put seeds on the rim of the cage, the bird will literally peck around the edge of the cage to eat, but it will not go back into the center of the cage to find the pathway that it followed to get in.

It's so busy kind of just following its normal path that it can't just see the obvious way out. It's kinda what you're saying, which is that when we are most trapped in this darkness and we need to try new things, we lock ourselves into this kind of obsessive behavior that keeps us distracted. We just keep going in a circle and we're circling that drain, but we never ultimately look up, so to speak. That's right. So this is a nice segue in the talking about literature.

Let's let's talk about Cervantes and the and the man who invented fiction. And what do you believe is his lasting influence on literature? So it's a great segue because Cervantes is one of those figures that I turn back to again and again in my teaching, in my writing, in my thinking as being one of those reminding voices. Right? Those voices in that undercurrent, that critical undercurrent.

So Cervantes, I wrote this book. I think I published it. I'd know I published it in 2016 because it was the four hundredth anniversary of Cervantes' death. Cervantes Miguel de Cervantes lived in the sixteenth and into the beginning of the seventeenth century in Spain. He wrote, your listeners will at least know Don Quixote, the novel that he published, which, you know, most histories of literature would say is something like they would call it the first work of modern literature, the first modern novel.

It's often referred to and I wrote a book that called called The Man Who Invented Fiction, which was in part biography, intellectual biography, in part sort of intellectual history of that moment in time, what we call in intellectual history, the early modern periods or the beginnings of the modern period. And in part, a philosophical claim for what Miguel Cervantes was doing when he wrote this book that became the first modern international bestseller. So it's a book that talks about all of his other works as well because he wrote many, many others. He was an extraordinarily prolific writer at the end of his life, lived a swashbuckling life. He was a soldier.

He was an adventurer. He was a prisoner in North Africa. He experienced like we were talking about, he traveled enormously for a man of his time. He experienced different cultures. He learned other languages.

He learned to open himself up. And he came back with eyes that could see that the ideology of the homeland he was returning to, the one that he had bought, he had swallowed hook and sinker. From a young age, he'd gone and he had fought wars. He had almost lost his life. He'd lost his freedom.

He'd lost the use of one of his hands in the service of this of king and country. That he began to see the world through critical eyes. Right? It's as if the lenses that had been given to him, the framework that had been given to him by his entire upbringing were suddenly taken off. And he lived in a totalitarian, from our perspective, a totalitarian theocracy.

You couldn't really openly write treatises that would undermine the religious and and political certainties. They had something called the inquisition, for example, whose job was to, you know, make sure that there there weren't a great number of free thinkers around. But you could write stories. And in your stories, you could represent the world in certain ways. And that's what Cervantes did.

So he wrote novels, stories, plays that in each case, and this is what I argue is how we invented what I call fiction, modern fiction, and how modern fiction is so important and influential today. These stories were not just about a representation of the world or how the world might appear to one person. They were representations of how we think about, imagine, and perceive the world, argue about it, sometimes get it right, and sometimes get it wrong. So what he did is he sort of created a fold of representation and made his books be about people believing things, and sometimes getting them right and sometimes getting them wrong, and always getting it funny. Because he was the other great thing is he's one of the funniest writers who ever lived.

So this is the great, great example of this is Don Quixote, which is a story of a madman. But it's a madman who sometimes is getting the world right. Sometimes he's getting it completely wrong. He's always interpreting it according to his set notions of of how the world must be. And his interpretations are leading him into all sorts of hot water and really, really funny situations.

And so that's the classic example. But many of his other works are like that as well. So in some ways, you know, as you're gleaning yourself, it's not that the books that I'm writing and the things that I'm talking about are always very far afield from each other. Sure. I've just written a book of in large part about a theoretical physicist, which at first glance, prima facie doesn't have much to do with the seventeenth century Spanish writer and soldier.

But the philosophical themes are still there in a way because we're still talking about how we imagine reality must be out there in the world and of itself and all of the really interesting and problematic filters that we use when we're thinking about reality, when we're perceiving reality, when we're arguing about it. So these these are all themes that a great writer like Cervantes was was working with. Interesting. So let's talk about the theater of truth, which focuses on baroque aesthetics. How do you see the ideological underpinnings of the baroque period influencing our contemporary thought?

Absolutely. So that's a book that I wrote, it was probably about a decade ago, I wanna say. And it is in the the same historical period, the early modern period. It focuses on on Spain and on texts from the new world, from colonial Latin America, and also on more contemporary stuff from the twentieth century. And as you just pointed out, it's a book about what I call Baroque aesthetics or Baroque and neo Baroque aesthetics.

And the Baroque historically was precisely the period in time when Miguel de Cervantes wrote that book. But other things were happening. The world was being expanded through colonial exploration. New horizons were opening all over the place. New discoveries in science were changing the world and our picture of the cosmos.

And a new kind of medium was rising in the world. Cervantes made huge use of one of them, print medium. So we had the radical expansion of the printing press from the middle of the fifteenth century on. It It was dominating the world by the beginning of the period we know as Baroque. So you think around 1600 and going forward.

And what was happening in Europe was the rise of another form of mass medium, which was theater. This impact of organizing space and spectacle in certain ways and how this impacts the way that humans organize society, the way they think about themselves as individuals, the way they think about the interaction across space, the way they philosophize about what an individual self is. That was a theme of my very first book, a book called How the World Became a Stage. And the idea there is that in this early modern period, if you want kind of one lasting, thoroughgoing metaphor that comes from a real source, which is the emergence of a very dominant institution at the time, that a metaphor for understanding how the world changes. It is the stage.

It is theatricality. It is the difference between an actor and the character that actor is portraying. And that this idea that we can create this screen and that there's a difference between us on one side of the screen and the representations of ourselves that we're playing on the other. This reverberates through philosophy. It reverberates through politics.

The very idea of a representative, for example, state where you have individuals who never see each other but somehow imagine each other as being part of the same entity. Well, they're doing so because they have the ability now to take a kind of little piece of themselves, create an avatar, we would say today, and imagine that avatar is being represented in a body of government or is has a particular relationship with the sovereign. So they imagine a sovereign state is as holding these little elements of themselves. I've been making the argument all along that this comes from something. The ability to think in those terms comes from something.

And it comes from the ways basic everyday skills and practices in storytelling, in writing, in imagining ourselves are filtered through institutions like the rise of the theater. So in the theater of truth, that's precisely what I'm talking about. And it does absolutely have applications and reverberations with what we were talking about today because everything we've been talking about up to this moment has been really founded around a concept. And that concept is reality. What the world actually is.

And it turns out that different cultures at different times have very different ideas about something called reality. Our modern word reality and the different languages that it exists in really comes into usage precisely at the time that I'm talking about around the turn of the, of the seventeenth century. Why? Because once you have a metaphor, a spatial metaphor, like the stage that separates actors bodies from the characters they're portraying. Once you have that disseminate so that it becomes a natural way of thinking about the world, it is precisely what allows for the separation between, oh, the world that I see and feel with my senses that I discuss with, that I'm in constant contact with, and some real reality on the other side that maybe I can't quite access but must be there.

That the world is in a certain way despite or beyond my reception of it. And that notion of reality is precisely the one that figures like, you know, my most recent book figures like Einstein are digging into and saying, no. It must exist in a certain way. And, I kinda know what that way is no matter what the current science is telling me. You know?

And this is not really to dig at Einstein who still was despite that prejudice, you know, the most brilliant person or one of them of the twentieth century. This is it's the to take the example that you can be as brilliant as someone like Einstein and still have these unconscious desires to believe in reality in a certain way. But what those earlier books that I was writing were trying to point at is that there's a structure to how we think about and divide the world into the reality out there and our perception of the reality inside. It's made its way into philosophy, but it comes from very practical and real things, like putting characters up on a bunch of boards and hanging a curtain and starting to tell stories that way. So you talk about stories, you talk about theater, and you talk about the ways in which we perceive reality.

In our current world, young people are very disillusioned by the stories that the boomers, in a sense, tell. So for instance, the notion of salvation being in a particular way, the notion that certain groups, whether or not they're the gays or the women, should be put into certain categories based on a book that was written thousands of years ago. That, you know, if you violate the Sabbath, you you should be stoned to death. You stone the wayward son to death. How do we take these stories that meant something that were concretized and written down thousands of years ago and somehow communicate to people that there is a way of softening them and seeing them in a more metaphorical, philosophical way, and not such a, you know, again, the notion that the God of the old testament is this very punitive God and and so forth.

How do we get people to understand these stories in a more modern context? Absolutely. I mean, the the fundamental way for me is being and helping convey to my students a more nuanced understanding of history. So someone with a nuanced understanding of history, the first thing they're gonna realize is that fundamentalism, which is one word for the way of approaching the Old Testament stories as if they were absolutely true and as if their moral lessons had to be followed to the letter and the examples that you were just giving me. Right?

That no, fundamentalism is actually not the way that the vast majority of the history of world has dealt with beliefs like that. To go back to the very beginning of our conversation, in the vast majority of the history of humanity, people have had an understanding that different beliefs function in different ways. To take an example, to use the example that you were implying right now, biblical literalism. Augustine, Saint Augustine of Hippo, the Bishop of Hippo, was writing two thousand years ago almost. And he wrote an entire book condemning the literal literal interpretation of the Bible.

He said it's absolute nonsense to interpret the Bible literally. There's all sorts of ways of reading and metaphorical, analogical, anagogical, all sorts of levels of interpretation that we need to and must apply. The same thing with the Talmud, with the reading of the Torah in Judaism, the reading in certain areas of Islam. All the religions of the book have understood that the messages that come from God, so to speak, directly through the various prophets aren't delivered to us in a language we necessarily understand. And hence, we need to respect the difference of human reason, that human reason doesn't function.

You know, assuming you believe in an ultimate God, that the very least you need to do is have the humility to understand that you can't reason the way that God does. And hence, every lesson that you learn, every conversation you have about ultimate things has to be tempered by that humility, tempered by that knowledge. Right? And that this is so to go directly to your very, very good question, it's to show that kind of humility in yourself, in your teaching, in your conversations, and also to show that great thinkers in the past also had that humility, that it was necessary for their understanding of the world too. Yeah.

It's fascinating. You know, as somebody who has read history, presumably not nearly as much as you, it is interesting to me that I think each generation somehow sees themselves as superior and modern and thinks of people in the past as the barbarians, instead of recognizing that in the human realm of consciousness, the great thinkers two thousand years ago were every bit as sophisticated and rational and grappling with these issues in the same way we are, and that that also can help us lead to that humility instead of wrecking seeing ourselves somehow as being, you know, the moderns and post enlightenment, so to speak. Yeah. I think you're right. I think that we have to really do this is what I see as sort of my personal mission is to keep that great multi generational conversation going because there's wisdom in the past.

It doesn't mean that you simply bow down and say everything that the past thought is correct. No. Of course not. I mean, enlightenment also comes in stages. We do believe that we've improved.

And one would hope that. Right? One would absolutely hope that each generation comes up with new improvements, new ways of seeing the world, and that those new ways, in some ways, are going to be better. But if you just automatically whole cloth adopt everything new as being automatically better and forget about it. You just turn your back on everything from the past.

You're going to forget very important lessons. You're going to break the thread of that multigenerational conversation, and you're going to lose wisdom. Wisdom are truths that precisely because of the humility of their standpoint that they pass on to others, that truths that are lasting precisely because of that, not because they believe that they know everything in objective certainty, but rather wisdom is always humble. Wisdom opens itself up to correction. And that's something that is worth promulgating to the best of our abilities.

So in addition to that, I think great advice. Are there other areas of advice you would offer for aspiring, quote, scholars interested in exploring the intersection of literature and philosophy? And and what advice would you offer them? I would say follow your curiosity. Right?

Curiosity is our greatest gift in that sense. The sense of the ability to be awed by something, the ability to express wonderment at the world, and then read deeply and widely, right, from as many perspectives as possible. You know, you at any time you walk into my, my living room back, there's stacks of books of all different kinds. I'm always like yours, you know, and I'm always reaching for something new and always mixing it up. New knowledge also comes from, you know, these potent admixtures of different ingredients, different intellectual ingredients.

I try to get as much different kinds of stimulation at all times. And then I would say finally to remember that wisdom that I'm trying to aim at in my teaching and my writing, what it does resist is fads. So it's right that the most recent thing or just what's happening on social media and then you have to switch platforms is it can be entertaining, but it's not likely to offer the greatest inroads into wisdom. Makes sense. So let's talk about humanities for a second.

You you have a role as the Decker professor and director of the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute. What significance do you see in the humanities for individuals in our society? So for so many of the reasons that we've been talking about, and I'll take the particular instance, the particular case of higher education where I work, more and more, and with good reason, we are tempted into fields that are highly specialized. And why do I say with good reason? Because specialization produces results.

Right? You are an electrical engineer or a computer engineer. You focus on some, you know, developing, new insights into machine learning. The next thing you know, you're part of a very small focused team. And they're producing the next cutting edge large language model.

And look at you. You've gone and you've created amazing new technologies. The humanities should, by nature and in their basic structure, be a kind of a break on that process. But I would hope to be kind of a salutary one that slows people down, that makes people think about the place that they are in a particular historical moment, that prompts them to think about prior historical examples, to make connections between what they're doing and others, to draw wider conclusions, to draw potentially, to ask ethical questions. These are all things that we we teach in the humanities.

Taking time in seminar rooms to discuss things, to ask questions, even questions that seem maybe from the perspective of an outsider in a particular time, hair splitting or pointless can be an exercise, an exercise in additional profundity, an exercise in thinking outside the box, taking the next step. And I believe that there's an inherent value in that. It's a it's a value that, as I mentioned before, is necessary for the development, for the cultivation of discerning intellectually vibrant community of of thinkers, of actors, of of citizens who are engaged in the world, who are thinking outside of their own little box and and wondering about how to make things better, how to connect what they're doing with others in the world. So it's kind of a vocation, I would say, at this point. My work is in the the Grass Humanities Institute at Hopkins.

Hopkins is a wonderful university. It's one of the best in the world, but it definitely does have this ethos to it of kind of high driven, practically minded students who are there. They believe by and large to be doctors. A good two third of them, two thirds of them arrive with that idea in mind. And and I do try to be a little bit of a, in a very positive sense, stumbling block, right, to try and disrupt these well laid plans with some interesting questions that can get them thinking and get their minds expanding in ways that aren't necessarily so targeted and, and goal oriented.

Yeah. You know, it's it's fascinating as I'm listening to you because we start out talking about, again, science and then the nonlinear approach to life and the more, you know, non rational, mystical, philosophical. And what's fascinating is that we live in a time when people are trying to measure things. And going back to your Rigor of Angels book, I mean, measuring things. The paradox is that what you're discussing in the humanities is also similar to, like, what people experience when they meditate, for instance, which is that you get these benefits that are not measurable and they're not quantifiable.

And so people will say, oh, I don't have the time to meditate. And yet, they'll say, well, if I meditate for twenty eight minutes, it actually clears up four hours from me. And they're like, what? That doesn't make any sense. And in the Bible, there's this measurement in the temple in the Old Testament where the space is it doesn't work.

In other words, the space is actually bigger than the measurements. The things don't fit in there. I've always thought that one of the hidden messages of that is that the paradox is when you can't measure something, that there is something in this magical place outside of time and space where there is this infinite possibility if you surrender to it and you're opening yourself up to it. And I think what you're saying about humanities is that's a way of delving into that world of the non measurable, and yet you walk away feeling and ex and becoming a bigger, more present human being. And it's not measurable, but there's an intuition that you know you've been touched.

I believe that's true. And I would say, you know, one of my favorite quotations from Immanuel Kant, the great, Prussian philosopher, who's one of the figures that I write about in The Rigor of Angels, is in his great book on ethics where he says at the end, you know, two things fill me with awe, the starry, skies above, and the moral law within. And it's that that equivalence of outside the infinite expanse of the universe and the ability of the human mind and reason to stretch itself out to at least see how great and how awesome it is and to recognize its own smallness in comparison with it. And at the same time that the depth of the moral law within that I look into myself and I see this capacity for good no matter how evil the world is, no matter how iniquitous my impulses are, that I see, that I can, that I am ultimately, at core, someone capable of acting in a moral way. Those were these two moments, this equal and opposite poles in Kant that that he said filled him with awe.

And I think that's the statement from that great philosopher that echoes what you're talking about. Yeah. No. That's a beautiful way to put it. You know, to go back to something that you were saying before, we live in an age where anxiety and uncertainty are leading people the way that they often do to close themselves off, to form small groups of the like minded, to cloak themselves in their own certainties, to not question.

And I think, as hard as it is, the most important thing that we can do is question and not others, but question ourselves first and foremost. Because it's by self questioning and opening up and being exposed to the possibility of being wrong, that someone else is right, that someone else's experience might be a corrective to yours, that we can grow and it's only in that way that we can grow. Beautiful way to end Bill. Thank you. That's great to hear it.

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