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Who thinks that they can subdue Leviathan? Strength resides in its neck; dismay goes before it. It is without fear. It looks down on all who are haughty; it is king over all who are proud. These words inspired PJ Wehry to create Chasing Leviathan. Chasing Leviathan was born out of two ideals: that truth is worth pursuing but will never be subjugated, and the discipline of listening is one of the most important habits anyone can develop. Every episode is a dialogue, a journey into the depths of a meaningful question explored through the lens of personal experience or professional expertise.
PJ (00:02.682)
Hello and welcome to Chasing the Viathan. I'm your host, PJ Weary, and I'm here today with Dr. John Russon, professor of philosophy at the University of Guelph, and we're talking about his book, Adult Life, Aging, Responsibility, and the Pursuit of Happiness. Dr. Russon, it is wonderful to have you on today.
John Russon (00:20.922)
Thank you very much for the invitation. I appreciate it.
PJ (00:25.686)
One, I'd love to start by asking why the book, but I just want to say that as a parent, I really loved the inspiration for the book. I know that there's a lot of philosophical-wise, but the fact that you started writing this around that time of your son having his third birthday really means a lot. I'm excited about the topic today. Tell us, why this book? Why adult life?
John Russon (00:52.492)
Yeah. I guess it starts back a little bit. I've always been deeply, philosophically and otherwise, interested in human psychology. And it has always seemed to me that that's what we should be concerned about. You know, we should be understood, we should be concerned with how we work as people and-
It seems to me so much in our world is built on not understanding that, that there's a lot we all need to do to really appreciate how people work and to, you know, build structures in our lives and build relationships that actually support us and, you know, keep us mentally healthy and all the rest. And so I think that, in fact, probably since I was a little kid, I've been concerned about that issue. But that's been at the core of my adult life.
my professional life is thinking about the nature of the human psyche, the human soul. And so this book, Adult Life, is the third of three books I wrote. The first one is called Human Experience, and that was really about childhood experience and childhood development and how we come to form our personalities with good habits or bad ones. In the context of a
upbringing in a family and so on. So that's, I was approaching this issue of the human soul from the issue of upbringing. And then I wrote one after that called Bearing Witness to Epiphany where I was again focusing on that issue of who we are as persons and what's a healthy and fulfilling life and so on. But I did that from the point of view of the
desire to you know go out and make a world with other people which I especially was associating with sexuality and the kind of developments that really come to us in our adolescent life typically. You know like we leave the family home and suddenly when you're a teenager or something like that you're really confronted with the reality that you're gonna go out more or less on your own and make a world with other people and build relationships and so that second book was again approaching the question of
John Russon (03:07.306)
what it is to be a person, sort of through the lens of an adolescent. I mean, it raises all kinds of other issues, but it was a, it was taking up those issues as opposed to the issues of childhood upbringing. And at that point, it seemed like a natural thing to complete that by thinking about, well, what's the distinctive kind of reality that adults face? You know, so that's, that's how, how I, like, I wasn't expecting to write that book when I started, but it just sort of unfolded that my study of people
turned into a study of sort of the life path, so to speak. And so I got to that issue through that. But then I'll say a second thing, and that is that just about how I think about philosophy. One of the reasons that I wrote that first book, Human Experience, which focuses on the child and the family and so on, was because though I was very wrapped up in thinking about issues of the family and so on, and it's all over.
psychology, family therapy and so on and sociology. I discovered that in my own discipline of philosophy, the family is to my mind a really under studied area. Like Plato talks about it of course, it comes up, Hegel talks about it, Locke talks about it, it comes up. But when you look at your list of philosophy topics, you'll see the justification of knowledge, the ultimate nature of reality, how to be a good, what's morally good or what's morally bad.
how to organize a just state or whatever, you know, but you won't typically find the philosophy of the family on those lists. So I really, you know, there are some things written about it and some of them are great, but it really seemed like a comparatively small domain in our discipline. And so I really thought, oh, this needs work. And so I then was sort of bringing my own existentialist and phenomenological philosophical orientation to thinking about the family.
as my philosophical method is phenomenology, which we can talk about. And I really thought, okay, what would a phenomenological study of experience in a family be? And so that's kind of where that came from. But so anyway, so in a similar way, when I got around to by this path I just mentioned, thinking I should write about adult life, I had exactly the same thought. I thought, I don't feel the topic. I don't find the topic of adulthood.
John Russon (05:33.702)
in the list of things that really people study very much in philosophy. And again, when I did start looking up literature on adulthood, if it comes from anywhere, it comes from psychology or sociology, but there's comparatively little in philosophy, but like the family, adulthood is like at the center of everybody's life, like that's what we, we all grapple with that question. How am I going to be an adult? You know, and
just as we grapple all the time with, how am I gonna deal with my family relationship? So to me, it just seemed like a topic of actually burning importance that was sort of underrepresented in the discipline. And I felt like I had a, on each of these things, well, all of the family, adolescent sexual experience and adulthood, in each case, I felt like I had something to contribute. I felt like I'd been thinking about this for years
So my own life had been sort of the gradual process of digesting those dimensions of our lives through my philosophical learning and my philosophical perspective. And it just seemed like a natural thing to try to write about. And it was, the last thing I'll say is it was, for me it was a real process of learning because as I sat down to write it, I thought, well, I don't actually know what to say. I had to think, what is adulthood? And so my book is,
PJ (06:57.478)
Heheheheheheh
John Russon (06:59.986)
offers an answer to that, but it's the thing that I produced by myself struggling with that question and having to figure out what is this thing and how should it be talked about and what are its dimensions? And so I'm actually quite happy with the book. I feel like it says quite important things, but the reason I think that is because it was so meaningful to me. Like I feel like I learned a great deal by working on this study. So that's roughly where it comes from. And I guess I said that was gonna be the last thing, but I'll say one last thing.
You're right to mention my son because I think I had this idea in my mind for a few years Before I actually wrote it, but I if there's a certain way in which I didn't feel like I could really write about adult life I mean I could have but I couldn't write about it as well without actually having it been in that role of a parent Like it was I was feeling a little bit sort of held off from writing about it because I thought there is a dimension of adulthood that is so central for most of the
history of the human world, you know, and I'm an outsider to it. And it really was having a child and, you know, taking care of him that sort of completed my sense that, oh yeah, right, I have something to talk about here and I, you know, I kind of know where I want to go with this. So his coming into existence was actually a pretty big part of bringing it about that I had something to say.
Anyway, so that's my long-winded answer to your question.
PJ (08:30.923)
No, I love it. No, it's a great answer. It does for me beg the question, is there going to be another book in the works on being elderly eventually, you know, as you follow these stages?
John Russon (08:44.234)
Yeah.
John Russon (08:47.846)
It's that when I wrote this book, that became to my mind a significant part of it. Writing about adulthood pretty centrally, not exclusively, but pretty centrally turned into writing about aging and that issue of grappling with the fact of aging and especially grappling with it when you're in those parts of your life where you feel like, oh, I'm getting old now. And so that's...
That's already a part of the study, and I have gone on to publish a couple of other smaller things specifically about that issue of, you know, growing old and dealing with it. So I think, so I don't think another book is in the works. I don't think, I don't think I have enough extra stuff to say for there to need to be another work, another book. But your point, I think, is a very good one. Like there is a real phenomenon there, a real part of human life.
huge one, hugely important that does need to be studied. And where we as individuals need to grapple with it and learn about it, you know? And so I feel like I have made a start in that. I've said the core things that I think I would say about that in this book. But it is understudied and in fact, the only sort of major work of philosophy that I can think of that addresses that is a book by the.
French existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir. She wrote a book about old age and it's quite big. Her more famous book, The Second Sex, is about women. And I think when she wrote this book about old age, she was imagining it was gonna be as impactful a book as The Second Sex and sort of make people aware of the issues of aging and generate a movement there, like her book on women massively contributed to sort of feminism and so on.
but I don't think it really happened. So of course there are great studies of aging and so on, but I think her book is the single biggest entry in that domain and it hasn't really been met with a lot of other studies. So anyway, yeah, I'm not gonna write a further one, but I think that is a big issue and I have tried to make a meaningful contribution to it through this book.
PJ (11:09.262)
Yeah, I was about to say, I mean, I noticed that aging is a major theme throughout. And I just, uh, just because you have the child and the, the teen and the adult in some sense, I just wondered, um, I do want to, and I, I think this is going to govern a lot of the discussion. What is your goal in philosophy? Because you, you've just talked about, like, you thought this work was important because it was personally meaningful. And, um, that's one, I resonate with that, but I definitely think there's a lot of philosophers who would be like,
John Russon (11:15.948)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
PJ (11:39.194)
That's not what makes philosophy meaningful. And so I would love to hear when you attempt to do philosophy and when you are trying to relate philosophy and communicate philosophy, what is your goal for philosophy?
John Russon (11:40.598)
Yeah.
John Russon (11:51.69)
Yeah, yeah, that's a great question. You know, philosophy, that's a word that people can use in lots of different ways. And I won't go through all of them right now, but maybe other ones will come up. But of all the different ways one can think about what philosophy is, I really think its deepest meaning is wisdom. I think that that's what it's about. It's about the issue of what counts as the wisdom that human people need to live by.
to live well. And so I think that the philosophy as a discipline, what I understand to be included in that discipline, are all the great works of human wisdom. You know, and so if I'm studying Plato or Descartes or Marx or Freud or whoever it is, those people to my mind are worthy of study because they have contributed profoundly to
our human efforts to understand ourselves and understand our world and so on. And so in my teaching, first I'll say that, in my teaching, I really think of my goal as bringing these great works of human insight to a new generation of people, you know, 19 and 20 year olds who are coming to university trying to figure out how to live and what their life is gonna be about.
I'm trying to play that role of initiating them into what humanity has learned about being a person in the same way that the person teaching chemistry is introducing you to what human history has learned about chemicals and how they interact and what their values are and so on. Like I think that philosophy isn't particularly a matter of, you know, making stuff up or anything like that. It is...
uh... recognizing and carrying on this great human tradition of figuring out how to make sense of our lives and i'll just say one more thing about that i think also though you know sometimes if you are learning chemistry or if you are learning history sometimes people present those studies as if they're a bunch of facts and see if you can get a little in these facts and it's kind of tedious whatever
John Russon (14:19.614)
rather than presenting those things, the history of chemistry or the history of dates and so on, rather than presenting those things as things the importance of which you can understand because they speak to real issues in our lives and so similarly with philosophy sometimes very commonly in classes or in things you might read on the internet you get a presentation of
philosophy that says, oh, so and so said these things, and somebody else said these things, and you're presented this material as if it were just facts that you might or might not be interested in. There are things you could use in a trivia game, but whatever. But I try to teach philosophy quite differently. I think that my job as a teacher is to show that these issues from 2,500 years ago, or whatever it is,
are of gripping, should be of gripping interest to each student as an individual student, right? So I think of my job as trying to bring together the very personal concerns of individual people, individual students, with the great established works of our human tradition and showing that those works come out of the...
needs and interests that real people have and therefore they can speak to the needs of real people in ways that are profoundly important. And so then similarly in my own sense of my own original philosophical work, I'm trying to do the same thing. So yes, I am trying to do something that is personally profoundly meaningful to me, but that's not the thing by virtue of which it should be called philosophy. It should be called philosophy if it's actually wisdom.
I'm trying to do the same thing that again a chemist is doing, like I'm trying to be a scientist in a way. I'm trying to establish the things that are true and that can be shown by the most rigorous methods to be true and to draw on the most compelling evidence and all the rest. So I think of the thing I'm doing as extremely demanding and extremely rigorous. But it's not alienated. It's not the study of some weird object out there in the world.
John Russon (16:41.01)
It is the study of the things human beings need. And therefore, that rigorous, demanding study of the real character of things is also something that needs to be of profound interest to me. Like if it weren't, that would kind of be evidence that I wasn't being rigorous. That would kind of be evidence that I'm sort of letting myself off the hook and just turning it into a.
more like a trivia game, you know, so I so that's so my goal is to My goal is to draw on everything I Have learned everything one can learn from the history of the discipline to try to bring those resources to bear on the pressing issues of our lives and of our world right now and to make meaningful original contributions to that
that reflect my own sense of what's important, but that also will be of meaning to other people. In fact, look, I'll say one last thing just because of what I just said. That's in fact the specific project I'm involved in right now. I'm trying to write a new book, which I'm tentatively calling To Live in These Times. And I'm really trying to bring everything I can to analyze as rigorously as possible what is the distinctive character of our contemporary situation.
and how can the resources of philosophy be used to help us live well in that setting. So I just, excuse me, I mention that just because that sort of completes exactly this thing I'm saying about what it is that I'm trying to do in philosophy.
PJ (18:27.182)
Well, so let me just make sure that I'm tracking with you here. You know, I hear it almost sounds like what you're speaking against is kind of this idea of philosophy is like a history of debate, right? It's it's let's follow the trail of debates and instead trying to bring people into maybe call it the great conversation, but this ongoing kind of self-conscious conversation with the idea of
personal and communal growth. Similar, would it be similar in the way that I think we've all experienced talking to a very good friend or talking to a partner or spouse, and you get into a very spirited discussion, let's say, and the point becomes about whether or not you're right and not about how you can grow together in your relationship as a person and together. And I think...
I definitely see, and I think that's sometimes when people get frustrated with philosophy, they get frustrated with it being about all you care about is, you know, you're a terrible person even if you are right, and I don't care, right? And so is that tracking with you?
John Russon (19:29.678)
the
John Russon (19:39.126)
Yep.
John Russon (19:43.466)
Yeah, I'll say one thing that's a slight variant, but that's very much the right kind of thing. I would say that, yeah, when people in the conversation with friends you were just talking about, people get in an argument and they wanna win. And I think that the, yeah, when you got to that point, it's actually not that healthy or happy anymore.
But the thing that's really needed is not so much to figure out who won as, I mean, sometimes people are not doing things in good faith or being unfair. So sometimes there are people who should lose, but, you know, generally speaking, the thing that's that really matters is understanding what the, what the real thing is, the important thing is that this person is coming from and what the real thing important thing is that this other person is coming from and.
If you, typically if you can see that, that the way that each person is coming from something that is worthy, you can figure out a way to reconcile things, right? But often we don't think about what the important thing is that we're coming from, we just think about our sort of particular claim and we fight it out. Well so similarly with the history of philosophy, I think your expression was a good one. People often treat it as a sort of history of a debate, and I...
I think that's the wrong way to think of it. I think it's an unhelpful way to think about it. It's not, I don't see it, I don't see the importance of philosophy coming out when you think, oh, here's somebody with a claim arguing against somebody else with a different claim. I think you appreciate the history of philosophy when you see, I think of it as a history of insight. So when you see what the real insight was that is being expressed through that person's claim.
that's when you really start to get it. And so, analogously to that conversation with your friend or whatever, I think in studying the history of philosophy, that you see a lot of people who, on the surface, appear to be saying different things. But rather than imagining, oh, all of them have to be compared on the same map, and they're all saying different things about the same set of topics, I think each of those people kind of needs to be understood.
John Russon (22:10.226)
in his or her own sort of separate frame, and you need to think, what is the thing about us that is the recognition, the insightful recognition that this is drawing on? And when you do that, a lot of the appearance of debate disappears, and you see much more, oh, this is a person bringing out this, and this is a person bringing out this other thing, and...
you don't tend to think in terms of particular sentences that clash as seeing what the aspect of our life was that was being highlighted and analyzed. And then it is possible to reconcile those things and understand more deeply the range of different things in a life that you have to grapple with. So I think your analogy is good and it really, I would say,
I try to get away from thinking of the history of philosophy as a history of debate and instead think of it as the history of great insight. And I approach every philosophical writer sort of with the premise that this is true. And so the challenge is to figure out how it's true. And that's more or less my approach.
PJ (23:27.067)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I want to make sure that we get to talk about what wisdom is, but I feel like if we head that direction, we'll be starting your book from the back to the front, and I don't think that's fair to you. So instead, I'll ask, you know, a question that I think many in my...
John Russon (23:39.598)
Thank you.
PJ (23:48.194)
Well, I think in any generation, our culture is very odd in this way. I was just talking to my wife about this. But what does it mean to be an adult?
John Russon (23:59.31)
Uh-huh. I mean, I think...
John Russon (24:05.962)
I think the simplest sense of that is living as an adult means living in a way where you're trying to own up to your responsibilities. You're trying to take responsibility for the different dimensions of your life. And so that's different from a child because the thing children do and the thing children should do...
is they rely upon someone else to take care of a lot of stuff for parents, you know, and that makes very good sense. Even adolescents who are becoming much more independent still live in a, and sort of know that they live in a kind of a protected domain where they can indulge themselves in thinking, I don't have to worry about that. I don't have to take care of that. I don't have to deal with that. And I think becoming an adult is realizing you can't say that.
Right? It's realizing, oh, I've got to deal with this. From the most familiar sort of things your parents say to you, you've got to get a job. You're like from the most familiar sort of examples of needing to find a way to secure your material maintenance sustenance, you've got to get some kind of job or something, to the much deeper issues of
being responsible in caring for your relationships with other people, being responsible for caring for your own inner needs, and psychological or spiritual health, however you might think of that. Owning up to the responsibilities of taking care of the communities we live in and recognizing that
We depend on the social and political world around us, and those people around us depend on us, and we have responsibilities there that we have to answer to. So I think, as I said, that to my mind, the core meaning of adulthood is that taking of responsibility. So I differentiated that from the child and the adolescent, but then I would also say there are lots of people who are adults in one way or another.
John Russon (26:29.506)
but who live in denial of some of those things. It's very easy to tell yourself, oh, politics, I'm not concerned about that. That's not one of my issues. And you can carry on that way, but there's a bit of a dishonest disavowal there. You know, you're drawing on it, your participation in the community, you're drawing on all the things this political world gives to you, and not.
recognizing that that's a thing that you need and that needs your work. You know, similarly it's easy to live in people, for people to live in disavowal of the demands of their more intimate relationships. You know, we can we can handle very poorly, often out of disregard or disrespect the intimate relationships we have with our partners, with our children, with our parents, with our other family members, with our colleagues.
John Russon (27:29.558)
So on the one hand, I said, I think adulthood is, you should be taking responsibility for these things. But then I also think that the normal form our adulthood takes is that we have to learn to recognize many of these dimensions of responsibility and that by and large, we commonly live without having really recognized a lot of those things. Aging is a good one. Like it's one of the things that...
we eventually discover is we have to sort of admit that we're getting old. We have to own up to our aging. And often that happens to people when they're 45 or 50, they suddenly think, oh my God, I'm getting old. And at that point, what you're really realizing is that you weren't sort of being honest about that before. You know, like we kind of live in denial of things that are actually going on in our own lives. So.
So yeah, so I think the core meaning of adulthood is that issue of taking responsibility for these dimensions of our life. And then I would couple up with saying the way most of us go through that is by having certain levels of denial. And so the issue in adult life is often overcoming various dimensions of denial and becoming a bit more honest about.
what we are called upon to do to live well, to live responsibly and to live happily.
PJ (29:00.342)
Is there any connection between your concept of denial there and SART's use of bad faith?
John Russon (29:07.838)
Yes, indeed. Again, I didn't have this in mind when I started writing. But as I started working on the concept of adulthood, or maybe I shouldn't say the concept, but the reality of adulthood, many of the themes and thoughts that came out for me started to dovetail with the way Sartre and Heidegger and other existentialist and phenomenological writers
write about authenticity and its negative counterpart, either bad faith in Sartre or inauthenticity in Heidegger. And so yes, that would be another way to describe what I think is part of the accomplishment of this book. It's to take that existentialist language of authenticity and kind of translate it into the language of adulthood, translate it into the very concrete.
issues that people deal with as they as they grow up. You know so I guess I guess I could use that expression that I have I have come to think of the issue of growing up as a person as leading quite directly into those issues of authenticity as they as they come up in those figures like Sartre and Heidegger and so yes the denial of that is exactly living in bad faith being inauthentic about your own existence.
PJ (30:38.019)
And I understand that it could be some version of these. I mean, you can't have intersubjective without subjective, but do you see this denial as being primarily as existing in the realm of subjectivity or like intersubjectivity? Because I mean, you're talking about politics and not recognizing your responsibilities in politics. That's where that question's coming from.
John Russon (30:54.567)
Yeah, I would say.
John Russon (31:00.854)
Yeah, yeah, I would say both. I think on the one hand, we are subjects, right? That is to say, from the moment we start being alive, we find ourselves experiencing things, right? The world is appearing to us and we are always, we're always the one who's undergoing our lives as opposed to being one of the things we encounter in the world. And so.
In that way, subjectivity, it seems to me, is the domain of study. Like that's, that's if you want to understand ourselves, that's what we're studying. But I also think, excuse me, that.
that our subjectivity is inherently intersubjective in the sense that the very way we experience from the start brings with it our own recognition that we are in a world with other subjects too, other beings like ourselves. And so our life is always a matter of grappling with
this weird character of ourselves as being experiencing beings, but also grappling with the fact that we're wrapped up with others. And so I don't think there is any part of our life that doesn't involve both of those things. But of course, some things more emphasize one than the other. And so I guess I think, if I think in terms of the issue of subjectivity, as opposed to
of the domain of things that we might sort of just broadly call mental health or that sort of that set of things and i think first of all yes there are big issues of denial there are all kinds of ways that people
John Russon (32:49.742)
fail to appreciate their needs as subjects. We, you know, you could take this all the way back to the Buddha, you know, 500 BC. He says, people build their lives around trying to find stuff that they can get that's gonna fulfill them. And he says, that's not, it's never gonna do it for you. That's like being a drug addict, basically.
you're gonna keep clutching at these things in the world that you crave, it's never gonna solve your problem and you're just gonna live a life of sort of desperate clutching where what you need to do is let go of that stuff and notice about yourself that, you know, in just a sort of loose sense of the word, you have kind of spiritual needs. Like you need to, you need to grapple with issues of the truth, you need to grapple with issues of what it is to be good.
you need to grapple with the issue that you are a person who has to make a meaningful life. And so the Buddha, you know, is from the very sort of dawn of philosophy, says, we really, people commonly live in denial of their own subjectivity to use that language. And what we need to do is in fact, discover these deeper dimensions of our lives and take care of them rather than
trying to solve our problems by grabbing stuff in the world. And I think that remains totally true for most of us in 2023. There are deep needs of the human psyche that have to do with finding meaning. And we need to, it takes work, it takes study to learn some important things about oneself as a subject or as a soul or as a person.
and figure out what kinds of things will allow us to care for that in a healthy way. So I do think that there are very big issues of that, but then the intersubjective side, I think there are huge issues there and you know the loosest sense sort of the loosest word I might use to point to that is just something like community or something like that. Like we are beings who need a community from the very intimate communities of you know friends and
John Russon (35:14.126)
to the very diverse communities of political life. But from anywhere in that range, we are in need of being with others. And again, we can live in real denial of that. We can think, sometimes, one thing is because we're so dependent on other people, we very commonly find that dealing with others quite pressure-filled and challenging.
And so sometimes we even know that we know like, I'd really like to go with my friends, but it's a little bit intimidating to go to that social event. And so you convince yourself, I'll stay at home, you know, there's a kind of. There's a, there's a, there are familiar ways that people back away from aspects of social life and kind of hide themselves, you know, at home because it's challenging, uh, and, and thereby kind of lose out on it, but those, it seems to be those sort of familiar day to day.
practical things have a kind of deeper analog too, right? That we can really pretty seriously live our lives in denial of the deep needs we have for participating in a meaningful social world with others and isolate ourselves. I think that's particularly pronounced in, I mean, these days, but especially in 2023, a few years after this global pandemic where
all the medical and political and every other kind of and commercial institutions in the world said stay at home and do everything through the screen of your computer you know and it's now that we don't have to do that anymore we can go back out in the world but a lot of people aren't going back out in the world right there's people have really become habituated to ordering things online you know getting them delivered to their front door ordering food that way
having their communications all carried on through their little handheld computer. And you can live that way and not notice that what you have really done is massively isolated yourself from real human community and companionship. And I mean, it goes even deeper than that. Like you're alienating yourself from nature too. You're just living in your little bubble. You don't see the trees, you don't get out of the playground, you don't feel the dirt, feel the sun. Of course people get outside and so on, but I do think...
John Russon (37:38.702)
Uh, certainly in the world I'm familiar with the last few years has resulted in this massive withdrawal from social public life to private digital life. And that I think is, um, I think there is a deep denial of our intersubjective needs built into that. And it, and that has the consequence of also then in turn, you know, rotting
rotting the core of our subjectivity too. Like we have intersubjective needs and when we don't fulfill them, that's a failure to fulfill our subjective needs. We can make ourselves pretty deeply unhappy, deeply unfulfilled by thinking, oh, it'll just be a lot easier if I can just sit at home with my remote control, so to speak, and deal with those things. So I don't think there is one or the other. I think the needs of our subjectivity
specifically in the needs of our intersubjectivity are both profound and we can and do commonly live in denial of essential aspects of both of them and our healthy living requires work on both those
PJ (39:01.319)
So first, I just, I wanna clarify, make sure I'm on track. And it does have like kind of a follow-up question. As we talk about this subjective versus intersubjective, I think I understand that it's not just, you can't just subsume subjective under intersubjective. And like a good example is you have parenting, right? You have this intersubjective like,
You have the set of needs, these responsibilities that come with being a parent. And then there's this mental health side that would exist under subjective. And if you, it is a mark of unhealthiness to feel that you only should nourish your inner life so that you can take care of your kids. And if you do that, you will not serve your kids as well, but you don't take care of your inner life
John Russon (39:52.406)
Yeah, that's right.
PJ (39:56.954)
just to take care of your kids. That's not how that works. And so in many ways, then you become like a parasite or barnacle on your kids. But you talked a good amount about, or at least one specific moment, you talked about our needs, our intersubjective needs, is part of being adult to our intersubjective obligations and is one of the things that people struggle with, the denial of those obligations.
John Russon (39:58.734)
Exactly, yeah.
John Russon (40:07.032)
Yeah.
John Russon (40:22.733)
Mm-hmm.
John Russon (40:27.466)
Yes, yes, for sure. I think that the domain of intersubjectivity is a place where you especially see the sort of reciprocity of needs and duties. You know, like we need to be with others. But precisely what it means to be with another is to be kind of answerable to them. And so fulfilling our needs to be intersubjective means
putting ourselves in the position where we have responsibilities to others. So yes, I think that theme of duties is a very good one. And I think it is true that people can live in denial of that too. You can relate to other people like you relate to money and food and other kinds of property that, as the Buddha says, you sort of go grasping for that. Well, you can think, I want other people because I'm bored, so I want some other people around to entertain me or.
I want kids so that I have somebody look after me when I'm old or so that I have somebody to do like, you know, you know, I can very much understand why people when they're starting to have a family do think in terms of a picture of themselves. Like, wouldn't it be nice if we were, you know, mom and dad and we had two kids? That's fine. But when you actually have those kids, it matters that you realize they're people and they're not there to be decorations on your family portrait.
PJ (41:47.207)
Hehehe
John Russon (41:54.67)
There are people who are trying to develop a life and you have put yourself in the position where you have deep responsibilities to them. So, but people don't always do that. So I think, yeah, there can be lots of ways that we do try to relate to other people, but do it in a way where we try to shave off the duties. But you can't, it's not gonna work,
That's what it means to be with other people. They bring answerability with them. So we can get in lots of troubles there. But people can do that in their sexual lives, their romantic lives, like they can use people. And I think that's the deep moral problem is using other people. And that comes from thinking I want other people, but pretending that doesn't bring responsibility. So yeah, anyway, so I think what you said is right on.
PJ (42:54.907)
I want to ask this question before we get to I think that very meaty question of what you think wisdom is, but I just love this phrase, the spatiality of adulthood. Can you speak a little bit? What is the spatiality of adulthood?
John Russon (43:00.666)
Hehehe
John Russon (43:09.513)
Yeah.
John Russon (43:13.462)
Let me start in quite a different domain. Just think about animals out in the wild. You know, if you think of a squirrel, if I asked you to draw a squirrel or something, you'd probably draw a little squirrel body that anybody could recognize. But when we think about an animal in the wild or whatever, when we identify it, we think of that isolated little body. But the truth is, that's not really how a squirrel exists. At the very least,
squirrel exists over time. It doesn't just show up as a body. It's a thing that goes from being a little tiny guy up to a full grown thing and so on. And so the form in which a squirrel exists isn't a static isolated organism. It is that organism in a long historical process of doing things.
body of the squirrel isn't really just its organism either, because that organism can never be separated from a complex environment that it's interacting with. It has its food sources, it has its predators, it has its places, its sleeps, and all that sort of stuff, and so you can't really have a squirrel without a forest, without nuts and so on. So you draw a picture of a squirrel and you'd think...
oh that's what a squirrel looks like, but there's something really untrue about that. It doesn't look like a squirrel unless it's running after nuts or you're running away from the dog that's chasing it and growing old and so on. So the point I wanna make there is that when you think about that natural organism with a little bit of reflection, you can recognize, oh, that thing doesn't really exist apart from the larger environment that it inhabits. It's habitat.
the word for it. Well, so I would say then the same thing about us, the same thing about a person.
John Russon (45:15.746)
People have habitats too. We again are people whose existence can't meaningfully, can't honestly be separated from the larger worlds we inhabit. Partially that's the worlds of relationships, which is what we think about when we think about community. But there are material dimensions to that too. And I was saying before, like there's something troubling about people who've, these weren't the words I used, but I was effectively saying.
There's something troubling about people who have made their material habitat only digital communications devices as opposed to a habitat that includes trees and dirt and that sort of stuff. But there are other material conditions too. And you know, like in the modern world, our habitat includes cars and subways and airplanes, clothes, and of course, you know...
cell phones and all those other things, but that material infrastructure, I guess you could call it.
can't really be separated from who we are. It's only through that we're able to be the kind of people that we are. So that's part of then what I mean by human habitat. So now let's go back for a minute. When a child, like a two year old, is living in what is obviously the same house as the mom and dad, the way that house,
The way that house exists and is a habitat for the child is kind of different from the way that house exists and is a habitat for the parents. Even though it's physically the same place, what the child is getting out of it and sort of the meaning it has for the child is quite different. In the same way that if a squirrel moved in, you know, it's gonna relate to the house in terms of burrowing places or something like that, you know, and not storage places. TV isn't gonna mean anything to it as TV, but it might mean something as hiding place.
John Russon (47:14.934)
But so similarly for the parents and the two-year-old, the same room really means quite different things. And now to bring it back specifically to the issue of space, with a child, it seems to me that the little child that's one or two years old, there are at least two really big things there to say about space. One is it's probably learning how to walk. And so the child is actually going through the process of simultaneously
discovering how to manage its own limbs and discovering the ability to move across the room or something like that. And so, its development is in a pretty deep way, an issue of negotiating with space and changing its relationship to it. So that's the one thing I would say. Second thing I would say is, also for the child, and maybe even more important,
before it's a chair and a floor and a fridge and a stuffed animal, before it's any of those details, it's home. Like it's where mom and dad are, right? The child, at the most basic level, this space is its place where it's secure, where it's loved, where it can retreat to, where it feels protected. And so I think, so I would say there is a spatiality of the child.
which is the way that being a child can't really be separated from having an environment that you experience as home, if it's a healthy child, and from the process of growing up in part by learning how to navigate with space. That's kind of what I would mean about the spatiality of the child. For the parents,
John Russon (49:12.45)
they may, maybe they just moved into that house. Like they're still gonna make a home there, but it doesn't have that, this is where I've been since the day I was born experience it sort of has for the little kid. And the sense of home that parents have is still very real. We need to feel at home, but it's much more refined and just a different kind of set of needs than the tiny child has. But also the parents navigate with space quite differently. Right, for the child,
the space really is its space. This is the domain for me and mom. Whereas when you and I are in our house or when we go out on the street, we're very aware and we relate to that space in terms of recognizing anybody could be here and they have as much right to it as we do. So a big part of what it means to be an adult.
is to be able to relate to the spatial world in that kind of indifferent way. This I'm operating in anybody's space and that's almost the direct opposite of the way the child relates to space at home where it's like this is the place for us and so I would say there's a spatiality of childhood which means there is a distinctive way that being a child goes along with
inhabiting a spatial habitat. Space has a particular meaning, and the kinds of ways children interact with it are quite specific. They're things they have to do. There's also a spatiality of adulthood, which is the idea that being an adult brings with it a certain kind of habitat, not just in terms of material infrastructure and social relations, but at the very minimal level of being a way we relate to space as such.
And that is that we.
John Russon (51:09.358)
to really be an adult, you have to have come to relate to the spatial environment as the domain where other people can legitimately be there. And indeed, that's part of what you have to do with children when they're growing up, you have to get them to start recognizing, yeah, that's the neighbor's yard, you can't go there, or you can't do this in public, or whatever, like those are parts of the processes whereby children gradually change from having only a child.
a childish, I guess, experience of space to starting to develop a more adult relationship to spatiality. And so just the last thing then, I think that it's really worth exploring that issue more deeply, just like we can talk about what kinds of community relationships do we need for a healthy life? And what kind of material infrastructure do we need? We can also think...
how do we need to relate to the spatial environment to have healthy human, healthy adult lives? And a lot of that has to do with...
appreciating, contributing to the collective establishment of a public space. I guess that's the word I really want is public space. Like that's public space is adult space and, and adults to be an adult brings with it that responsibility of allowing there to be spaces for others and, you know, contributing to their maintenance and acting in an appropriate way around them. Um, uh,
So I guess that issue of spatiality is just sort of one of the levels of habitat. And it's a very basic one, a very primitive one, but quite an important one. And there are real needs and responsibilities around how we inhabit space, just as there are needs and responsibilities around how we deal with other people.
PJ (53:16.726)
Thank you so much. I really appreciate that answer. I think about, I do most of the cooking and the way that I immediately start creating boundaries around the kitchen, right, for the kids because this is not a good place for it to be your space, right? The street, and then you think about the denial of responsibility. I think we all feel the frustration of...
John Russon (53:36.221)
Yep.
PJ (53:41.87)
drivers who act like the road is theirs when it is not, right? So it's very childlike behavior. But I did want to be respectful of your time, but I did want to ask, you end with that commitment to honesty, which I think first and foremost, you have to have a genuine, to have a genuine internal life, a healthy life, you have to have that honesty.
John Russon (53:44.95)
Yeah, exactly. Exactly, yes.
John Russon (53:59.308)
Mm-hmm.
PJ (54:09.478)
but you also talk a good amount about this commitment to wisdom. And you say that's kind of the end goal in many ways of philosophy. What do you consider wisdom to be?
John Russon (54:13.014)
Mm-hmm.
John Russon (54:20.586)
Yeah. I mean, you know, that's okay. I think I'm going to give an answer that's just pretty similar to things that I was already saying that.
PJ (54:23.286)
No pressure, yeah.
John Russon (54:35.69)
I mean, I like you brought up the word honesty. I like that.
wisdom comes from comes out of being honest you got to be honest about what your situation is and
John Russon (54:50.943)
wisdom is what we have learned through our efforts to honestly appreciate the human condition. I guess the shortest, and so I take it your question is sort of, okay, what is it that we've learned? And so I think that the things I have been saying about trying to appreciate what we are as subjects or trying to appreciate our intersubjective needs, I mean, I think that's.
That's the core of the kind of stuff I would say that is the.
John Russon (55:25.25)
what a wise appreciation of our life really is about. So I think.
John Russon (55:32.538)
I think that...
John Russon (55:36.782)
some of the most important aspects of wisdom are this recognition that there is an issue of authenticity in our lives. It is in a human life.
there really is a crucial question of whether you're going to own up to your needs as a subject. And those most basically are the needs to figure out for yourself how your life can matter, how it can be meaningful. And there is no book you can go to get a simple answer to that. There's no recipe for it.
I believe you can't really live an authentic life without grappling pretty seriously with those, what we would call existential questions. And it's a thing one needs to do, grapple with the issue of why am I here and why am I living, what's gonna make my life worthwhile? So I think that is a...
a real piece of wisdom to recognize that.
it does matter in human life to be authentic or to grapple with that issue of authenticity. I think another very deep issue is the intersubjective one. I think, in fact, I think this may be the single issue that has most shaped my thinking and my living for my whole life. I think we need the support of other people and that our life at the deepest level is wrapped up with...
John Russon (57:24.29)
the desire to be recognized and appreciated by others. And we lie to ourselves when we think we don't need that. We lie to ourselves when we think we can get away without it. But also, the need to be recognized by others, again, brings with it that responsibility that we admit our responsibility to.
to the needs of others as well. And so I think another of the deepest pieces of wisdom is that idea that our very, who we are, our very selves, who we are is deeply wrapped up with a kind of ongoing dialogue of recognition between ourselves and others. And...
It matters very deeply whether we are honest about that, it matters that we pay attention to how we are or how we are failing to recognize others for the subjects that they are. And it matters a great deal that we recognize how much we need that and that we build our lives around that acknowledgement. So I think those two, that theme of authenticity and that theme of recognition, those are probably the two, the two,
biggest ideas that immediately come to my mind as what I think of as the great fruits of wisdom from a few thousand years of the human philosophical tradition.
PJ (59:00.245)
Heh.
I think that is a tremendous summary. Thank you so much for your time, Dr. Rustin. It has been an absolute pleasure.
John Russon (59:09.302)
Great, thank you very much.
PJ (59:13.542)
How'd you think that went?
John Russon (59:15.622)
I had fun.