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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_wehry:
here. books on rhetoric and play. day.
james_l_kastely:
Thank you. Thank you.
pj_wehry:
Dr. Castley, absolute pleasure to have you on today.
james_l_kastely:
Well, thank you. It's going to be fun to talk with you. Um,
pj_wehry:
So
james_l_kastely:
yeah.
pj_wehry:
I see there's a trail of your books here. You start with the rhetoric of Plato's Republic, and then you have rethinking the rhetorical tradition from Plato to
james_l_kastely:
Thank you.
pj_wehry:
postmodernism.
james_l_kastely:
Thank you.
pj_wehry:
And then you have this book, Loving the World Appropriately. How does your work kind of cohere in why this book in particular, why Loving the World Appropriately?
james_l_kastely:
That's a fun question. I was thinking about that. It all starts with bakers. I was working on Plato's dialogue, The Gorgias, and a dialogue I'd read maybe 15, 20 times and taught for 12, 14 years. All of a sudden I was saying, why is he talking about bakers? What's going on about bakers? What's that doing in this dialogue about rhetoric? The more I thought about it, I thought, oh, wait a minute. It's one of these sort of, you know, It's like getting knocked off your horse. And I thought, okay, I know what's going on in Bakers. And traditionally, Plato has been conceived of as one of the chief opponents to rhetoric. And people have thought him to be just someone who didn't understand what was going on in practical discourse and whatnot. And there was a book called In Defense of Rhetoric by Brian Vickers. And Vickers was so mad He was just outraged. And as I was reading this book I thought, well if Plato is as bad as you think he is, you don't have to debate with him because he's just irresponsible. And if his complaint against rhetoric is that he just, you know, that it can be abused, that's a philosophically unimportant position. But if following Baker's, you can imagine somebody who's inherited a natural practice making bread. And so there's no reason to question its goodness because it provides nutrition to people. And because he's a responsible baker, he decides, you know, my bread could be made cheaper and could last longer if I put in a preservative. But because he's not a doctor, he doesn't understand the preservative that he's putting in his potentially carcinogenic. And so what you have is someone pursuing a good and inadvertently creating an injury. Okay, if that's what Plato's
pj_wehry:
Hmm.
james_l_kastely:
thinking about rhetoric then what Plato really is really arguing is that we're born into languages And we take over the languages and we have no reason to assume That we who are using the language just are doing anything wrong And what we really need to do is to be refuted We need to we need to begin to examine the concepts that we are using and so Socrates spends his entire life refuting people and he doesn't refute propositions. He refutes people. And at one point he is
pj_wehry:
Hmm.
james_l_kastely:
likened to being a torpedo fish that stings you in your tongue swells so you lose your language. And so the whole point of refutation is to make you examine your language, to make you examine the thing that you feel comfortable in and you have no reason to examine. And that's why Socrates irritates everybody. and look at. The thing that you are doing is causing problems and you don't know it. And everybody assumes that that's an attack against their deliberate intentions. And you begin to realize you have this character who spends his life irritating everybody in these dialogues, going around and just challenging people. And he's challenging people in part because he's seeking to be refuted. because he
pj_wehry:
Hmm.
james_l_kastely:
cannot make a claim that he has superior knowledge. And so what you realize early on in these dialogues is these are all rhetorical exchanges. And the more you start looking at Plato's work, the more you look at less as sort of a contemporary practice of philosophy. And you look at more as a literary production. And the more I start to look at this in terms of the lens of literary criticism, I began to say, you know, these dialogues are really interesting and there's this tendency to translate them into positions where what you're in fact watching is by and large a rhetorical exchange enacted and that got me going. And then
pj_wehry:
Hmm.
james_l_kastely:
two things really happened, I think. One is I read the feedriss and I keep thinking I'm going to be done with it. said, okay, I understand that book. I'm going to put it aside.
pj_wehry:
Hehehehe
james_l_kastely:
But every time I do that, I come back to it, I think, you know, I got it wrong. It's more complicated and more interesting than I thought. And early on in that dialogue, Socrates is challenging the people who are rationalizing myths, you know, they're giving sort of rationalistic explanations of, well, if this goes on, here's what's really happening. Socrates says, I don't have time to do that. I have more important work. Well, you don't do anything. So what do you mean you don't have time to do that? But they says I don't know who I am And I thought that's really
pj_wehry:
Hmm.
james_l_kastely:
interesting. Why don't you know who you are? And then I began to realize it's because subjectivity cannot be known That you are in fact a mystery to yourself Jonathan Lear at one point, you know quoting Freud are working off Freud says a person is by the very nature out of touch with her subjectivity But another way to put that is we are not an object of knowledge. We are something that's evolving, something that's alive, that we are fundamentally different from an object. You can know a chair. The chair has a fixed shape, form, and identity. You can't know yourself. I mean, that's the interesting thing. You can treat that as an activity, but to borrow from Ann Carson, it's a ruse. You're never going to figure out who you are. interesting. And so the more I started reading these Platonic dialogues and looking at them less as works of philosophy and more as works of literature, the more I began to say, you know what, until the latter part of the script Plato was really a poet and what he was really trying to do was displace Homer and that's where the second book came from. The the rhetoric of this book. But then I said, I'll just look at the Republic briefly.
pj_wehry:
Ha ha ha!
james_l_kastely:
And the more I looked at the Republic, it was really interesting because it starts off with book one. And in book one, there's by and large a debate between Socrates and Throcymicus. And you know, Socrates wins as he always does, okay. And he's about to leave. And this is the starting book too. And they, and they, they pull aside. were you just trying to win a contest or you're really trying to persuade us? And they said, well, I was really trying to persuade you. And they said, well, you totally failed. We don't care that you won the argument.
pj_wehry:
Thank you. Bye.
james_l_kastely:
No one believes anything you're saying. And so in order to do a persuasion, it takes nine books. And so I started to think, well, wow, that's a really interesting thing. What we're seeing is a memetic presentation of an extended persuasion. And the extended act of persuasion is to show you that you value justice. Even though you, the characters in the dialogue say, nobody values justice. Listen, the only reason people are justice, they're terrified of being caught. And so it's totally self-interested and it takes nine books to shift that over. I thought, well that's really interesting. So it explains several
pj_wehry:
Hmm.
james_l_kastely:
things. First of all, that rarely occurs as a one-off. And if you start thinking in your life, rarely have you been just persuaded by one event. It's a far more complex process where you have to sort of entertain things, you have to go back, you have to examine them. And also I think, yeah, people have explained persuasion totally wrong. And the reason they explained persuasion totally wrong is they always have looked at it from the angle of the person doing it to the person being So persuasion has always been conceived to be an activity undertaken to get somebody else to do something Even when it's defended it's defended because for example an Aristotle or so by and large says Retters can help you make better inferences. That's what they can do. You know and I thought well flip it over Ask why does somebody need to be persuaded? What goes on when you're persuaded? and then I bumped into Ann Carson and And what Ann Carson does in that is she says, if you look at the archaic lyric poets of Greece, they didn't like arrows. They didn't like desire. They thought desire was the worst thing in the world. They talk about it being melted, of being attacked. is suggested that you are not an autonomous self, that this thing you had no control over was going to hit you and mess up with you, that no one plans to be in love. It's kind of like catching the flu.
pj_wehry:
Uh-oh.
james_l_kastely:
You don't know how it happens, but all of a sudden it has taken you over. And you would like to have a shot. You'd like to be immunized because you'd like to have control over your life. You know, as I explained to my students, during the semester, thing that you want to happen, especially if you have a paper due in my class, is to fall in love because that will just utterly mess up your
pj_wehry:
Ha!
james_l_kastely:
time. And you know that's what happens. The other thing is you begin to realize is it's not accidental who you fall in love with. You may periodically be wrong about it, but it somehow shows you something about yourself that you don't have access to in any other way. And then in the Greek world, arrows and persuasion are sort of companions. And I thought that's a really interesting thing. And they're companions because both of them can invade you and change you. And you can in fact create a self that's resistant to both. But you can only do so by choosing not to engage in the world. And so... All of a sudden when all this stuff start being put together, I thought okay, you know We have to rethink what persuasion is and we have to sort of say
pj_wehry:
Hmm.
james_l_kastely:
Why do we need it? How does it work and the more you start doing that you realize? It's the fundamental activity that defines us as these peculiar kinds of creatures who are capable of growing and And we're growing because we're persuading it. And that became a really interesting concept for me. And that's why I bumped into Jonathan Lear and his rereading of Freud and his discussion of subjectivity. And all of a sudden, arrows pops up again. And so I began to realize, well, wait a minute, what all of these people are doing is they're discovering how deeply we are an affective creature. We don't stand to the world in a neutral way. And if that's somehow a defining feature of us, how do we think about that? And so that's where this whole project came. And so in a sense, it's a lifelong effort to try to understand what sacraties was about and why it's both exciting and terrifying.
pj_wehry:
Hmm.
james_l_kastely:
And then to begin to sort of say, you know, in my whole life that I have been engaged in called persuasion, that I really haven't understood well, and I haven't understood well because it's been framed in a certain way. And I was thinking about this just before we started to talk about it, and this is something if I had a chance I would redo in the book. I often talk about the persuasion occurring because there's a point of dissatisfaction, And I thought, that's partly right. But then I thought, you know what? Think about the number of times in your life that you've picked up a book. And it's not that you're unsatisfied with anything, but all of a sudden the book took you over and persuaded you. And so it's often a response to something which isn't even perceived initially as a lack or dissatisfaction. But you begin to realize, because I've had this experience, I need to figure out who I am freshly. I need to reorganize myself. I need to say I understand this concept better. And to do that, you have to make an initial act, which is in some way, shape or form, I wasn't inadequate. I had not investigated things as fully as I should have. I had an understandable inability to be as open as I should be, and that's totally understandable. did as it grabbed me, you know, by my shoulders, shook me and said, look it, you have to think better. And you have a choice
pj_wehry:
Hmm.
james_l_kastely:
at that point. You can say, yeah, I do. Or you can say, no, I'm perfectly content with who I am and I'm not going to change. And that also began to make me think.
pj_wehry:
Mm.
james_l_kastely:
Persuasion is a potentially interesting way to think about what constitutes a good political system. In a good political system, one of the things that it has to do is create conditions and citizens that are genuinely open to persuasion. And that can become a way that we value something, and it can become a kind of a justification for democracy, that part of the value of democracy is it creates And so all of this stuff began to just come together. And you can kind of see how the books go. So the first book starts with refutation. The second book sort of pushes its way in as I'm trying to work on the third book. After I get the second book
pj_wehry:
Ha
james_l_kastely:
done,
pj_wehry:
ha ha.
james_l_kastely:
then I try to figure out what I learned in the second book and that's the third book. So that's kind of a long answer to a short question.
pj_wehry:
Great answer though, and I think it leaves us with a lot of fruitful paths to take. I think the first one, and I'm sure you've thought of this, you talked about you can't know yourself, that the subjectivity cannot be known. So how do you interpret Socrates probably most famous saying,
james_l_kastely:
Yeah.
pj_wehry:
know thyself?
james_l_kastely:
I think it's a ruse. And the way I understand that is it's very much, it's helpful to go back to Ann Carson's arrows. And Ann Carson says, desire works by a ruse. Because you always think what you're doing is pursuing the object of desire. But if you get it, desire vanishes. She always talks about the apple that's just out of reach. And you realize for desire to go forward, to stay out of reach. It's got to be there because you need to have a potential objective. But you also know if you get it, you're going to destroy the thing that gives vitality and energy to your life. And I think the quest for self-knowledge is the same kind of a ruse. It's not that you'll ever know who you are, but I would say it creates a productive dissatisfaction. It says you cannot risk content with who you think you are. kind of put this together is there's a when Socrates in the Fidris is doing the Palinode and beginning to talk about how do you fall in love with somebody and he said one of the things you realize is that what you perceive is the two of you dance in the course of the same God and which I would like to explain to my students that what that means is when you fall in love the person you fall in love with it's a rhetorical operation divinity. This is
pj_wehry:
Hmm.
james_l_kastely:
the God that you worship. And you worship it because that God is inside you. So in a sense, what love begins to do is it opens up the possibility of exploring the mystery of who you are. But you explore who you are, not through an operation like Descartes, by sitting in a room and thinking, but by engaging erotically
pj_wehry:
Thank you. Bye.
james_l_kastely:
with other things. What you love discloses or allows you to disclose the mystery which is inside you that you can never fully grasp but that you can sort of allow to emerge in more complex ways for lack of a better way of putting it. And that's kind of what you're doing. You're learning how to dance your divinity. And that's kind of what I think happens. And so I think the know yourself is should be read negatively, which is the reason you have to do this is you don't know who you are. are and you think you do. And it's my job as Socrates to irritate you and to say you are a more interesting person than you think you are. But for a variety of reasons you're not willing to take that risk because if you take the risk you're inevitably finding out you're not who you think you are and that there's work to do. That you should you know it's like when I reread my First thing I thought is I kind of recognize that book, but there are problems with it. And I didn't know there were problems with it until I came back and looked at it again. And so people ask me, well, why do you publish? Which is a good question. I said, well, I published to find out what I got wrong. And it's not so much, I think I'm gonna give everybody
pj_wehry:
Ha ha
james_l_kastely:
an
pj_wehry:
ha!
james_l_kastely:
answer. You get stuff, that's fine. But what I'm really interested in is, I see that I thought I saw. You know, where did I take over a concept uncritically? Because I thought I understood what it was, and I didn't really understand what it was. And if I engaged with that, that's the moments I become alive. That's the point where, and
pj_wehry:
Hmm.
james_l_kastely:
I try to talk to my students about this a lot. The gifts that you get always start with resistance. It's always when the draft says I'm not gonna let you write me this way But you're you were moving towards an answer that pre-existed this thing and I'm as a draft and I'm refusing it You have to deal with the resistance. You have to say why is this draft breaking down here and Inevitably it's because you have an intuition That's smarter than you're going to allow the draft to get to because it's seriously risky. And if you're willing to sort of stay with the resistance, all of a sudden an idea emerges which is smarter than you could have consciously come to by working through something. So you realize, well, wait a minute. There was something moving me forward that I couldn't get at because I had a whole series of sort of defense mechanisms to keep the draft safe and the draft decided to go wild on me and And it's only because it decided to go wild on me that I'm able to get at the thing that was really driving why I wanted to write this draft anyway. And so I kind of feel that this know-thyself really is sort of a caution sign, which says you don't know who you are. And neither do I. See, that's the interesting thing is I can't criticize you because I'm in a superior place of knowledge. is forcing a vision of yourself on you. And that's an inherently aggressive act, which is, hey, I know you better than you know yourself. Here's who you are. See, the only thing I can say is, and this is what Sakurita does is, give me language. If you give me language, I will show you how this statement and this statement don't come together. And I'm not trying to create an intellectual problem for you. What I'm trying to say is, there is a deep contradiction that has because no one has really challenged you in this way. And that this is not an individual moral criticism of you. This is in fact a discovery of who we are, that we are inevitably trying to work through blockages and contradictions and whatnot, not because we're inadequate in some sense, but because that's how they emerge. And that's how you work through them. That you're always trying to play a game of catch up. And if you think about your adult life, think about how much of your adult life has been trying to undo things that you learned before you had a chance to criticize them. And if you think about it, that's a continual
pj_wehry:
Hmm.
james_l_kastely:
act of persuasion. Because it only works if you finally say, yeah, that's right. And if you sort of intellectually agree with it, it's not there. It hasn't reconstituted you. There has to be this way in which. By incorporating this, I change who I am. You know, I become a little bit more, it's not like a total change, but I become more complex. I become capable of appreciating the world better. And what you know is there's a tendency then for that to freeze into a fixed identity. And this is part of why I want to say, you know, one of the things that persuasion does is it allows rhetoric to defend itself. versus philosophy is philosophy gives you knowledge, rhetoric gives you persuasion. And one of the things you wanna say about rhetoric is, thank God it doesn't give you knowledge. That knowledge freezes you and fixes you. That persuasion says, you've gotten this far, but that's not the end. And so what you wanna say, when persuasion fails, people assume it's knowledge. And you'll say, no, you've simply been persuaded. And so on one hand, can embrace this and be excited by it. Or on the other hand, you can be terrified by it, because it seems like there's no end point that you can rest at. That what you're always discovering is somehow you're not good enough. And that requires a certain kind of sense of self or engagement or excitement about the world. And most of us can't do it all of the time. That's why Socrates can seem peculiarly inhuman. You know, you can't really live a life quite the way he did. The fictional character did. That you'll find that you're frozen at certain points. And in part because it takes a lot of work.
pj_wehry:
because it's a lot of work to continually transform.
james_l_kastely:
It
pj_wehry:
Yeah.
james_l_kastely:
is. And this is where Lear becomes helpful to me. And if you say, well, no, I'm committed to that, I'm gonna do it. For Lear, that's a hysterical response. And you can understand it because like, hey, I'm gonna get out of this by an active will. The rest of the world can somehow be these slugs that don't look at themselves, but me. I'm gonna do it in USA. That's an absolute way of avoiding it. That's an absolute way of avoiding it. And so you know what I mean? Well, what do you then do? And the answer is I think you do a couple of things You talk to people you become sort of You sort of leader radically you figure out what are the things you love and by interacting with them their books There's films. There's people. There's whatever What it does is allows you to become I want to say allows you to have a richer and fuller life And the reward for
pj_wehry:
Hmm.
james_l_kastely:
that is it means that you're capable of, I want to say, more complex and interesting instances of erotic attachment. And you feel alive. And if the alternative is feeling not alive, then you gotta say feeling alive is a good thing. And so, persuasion all of a sudden becomes this larger and larger concern. And
pj_wehry:
Hmm.
james_l_kastely:
the more I thought about it, the more I thought, you know, just been talked about wrong for 2500 years, which you know is a kind
pj_wehry:
Ha ha ha!
james_l_kastely:
of an amazing thing to say and but I think it has been. And
pj_wehry:
Ha ha ha ha!
james_l_kastely:
for example, when I first started working on the Republic, I realized, wait
pj_wehry:
I love the audacity.
james_l_kastely:
a minute. Yeah, I mean, when I looked at the Republic, I thought, people have been reading this as a work of philosophy for 2500 years, they're wrong. What the what the Republic is, is a democratic epic poem. It's played as an attempt to move Homer to the side to say, listen, an aristocratic warrior ethos is not good for democracy. The interesting sort of drama in democracy is trying to understand what justice is, realizing that people tend to think that justice is something that you do because you can't get away with things. And if people have that attitude, it's destructive of a democracy. And so what you need is a work of art, what you need is a poem, so that you are persuaded to be just so that you are just rather than that you're just because you're a chicken. And you don't want a chicken democracy, basically. And so I think that the Republic really is an attempt to change the nature of a citizenry. And it's to change the nature of a citizenry through an act of persuasion. And what that's supposed to then do is to create a citizenry who are just because they've been persuaded that they value justice. And so that's kind of what I think was going on in that text. And so what
pj_wehry:
Yeah, did you mind?
james_l_kastely:
this all begins to make me
pj_wehry:
Oh, I'm sorry, go on.
james_l_kastely:
think, pardon? No. I was
pj_wehry:
Oh, I was just going to go ahead.
james_l_kastely:
going to say. No, it just tends to make me think that there are a lot of things to be rethought of after 2500 years.
pj_wehry:
Yeah, absolutely. Sorry for I just wanted to make sure I'm tracking and maybe just use different language. So when you talk about know thyself, what another way of be talking about is that that ruse and if if that is a mental block for someone maybe even talk about know thyself as kind of like the engine for transformation. Would that be a way of thinking about it?
james_l_kastely:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's how the rules works. It gets the machine going. Here's what it is. It gives you a purpose, even if the purpose needs to be held in the subjunctive mode or something. But yeah, it really says, look it. This is important and valuable thing to do. And it's another way maybe to paint your point, and that what you're doing. is a deliberative activity. It's not sort of random. It's purposeable activity, even if the final purpose is not reachable. And that's part of why it requires a certain kind of courage. There is a way in which you you've undertaken a quest and the quest at a certain point should have enough sort of, I want to say, engagement or pleasure in it, that the quest itself becomes reinforcing. And for that to happen, you also need a world to cooperate with you a bit. And I think this is the other thing that's
pj_wehry:
Hmm.
james_l_kastely:
interesting about erotic attachment is I spent a lot of time with taking this over this notion of responsiveness when I'm working on this book on rhetoric. And responsiveness is if I'm following Lear's reading of Freud, it's something that's fundamental to erotic engagement, that you begin as a creature born in response. And there's the loving response of the parent that is then met by the child demanding more. And the parent then also responding more. So there's this dialectic of responsiveness. And the responsiveness is what allows you to grow and growing complexity. And that somehow it's, when you make a demand and it's met in an affirmative way, then you make more demands. And the potential danger in that is you can imagine a world in which the demands are not met, or the demands are met in a destructive way. And so that there's a way in which, and this is where vulnerability comes in and you wanna say, okay, understand why the Greek poets are so terrified, that you can imagine a world that doesn't respond to you, a response negatively to you. And what will happen then is the autonomy you would like to have you lose control of and your life becomes diminished not through any real value of yourself, but simply because the world doesn't support it. And to some extent when the sort of full scope of that thought comes in, you realize luck is an enormous factor in human life and it can simply go away. Maybe a good way to think about this is what just happened with COVID. In COVID, the world became a far less affirming place. And what happened is, I'm beginning to think, is a fair number of people became depressed simply because when they encountered the world, the world would not give them back something that affirmed them. And then this can happen and you can also begin to see here's the political context If you're in a political situation This is I think the value for democracy if you're an authoritarian political situation You are not affirmed You know what is affirmed is the person's in charge and as a result of that you might want to say Your possibility your subjectivity is diminished not through any faults of your own, but simply by the misfortune of being in that political circumstance. And, uh, well, I like to feel one had more control over one's life, but I don't think you do. Uh, I just think there's this element of luck, so that if you, if you're fortunate enough to be in a democracy, you should value it enormously, uh, because a lot of people are not, and I'm not going to say that. Yeah.
pj_wehry:
I was just going to ask a few minutes ago, and I understand that you're using it differently. But when you talk about erotic attachment, do you mind just for our audience distinguishing
james_l_kastely:
Yeah.
pj_wehry:
that from the more commonplace use of erotic just to give a fuller and clearer picture of what you're talking about with that creation of the subjective?
james_l_kastely:
Yeah. Yeah. It doesn't mean erotic attachment doesn't mean sort of, we might say, sort of more balder notion of sexual attachment. It means the sort of thrust for connection with something which is loving. And so that that that eros as a force, at a time, at a time can take in fact, sexual activity. But as a force, it's inevitably compelling you outside, better what? As a force, it's inevitably invading you. And
pj_wehry:
Hmm.
james_l_kastely:
it's making demands on you, and you're making demands on it. And so there's a way in which you want to say that we are somehow the medium through which this force operates. And what it does is it's inevitably compelling us to find objects. And the objects are not quite what we want. But they then come back and affirm us, make a demand on us, and then we make a demand on them. And then this dialectic back and forth, you might would say an affective bond might be the better term of putting it. An affective bond is formed. And that bond just keeps expanding, or potentially And maybe a good way to think about it is if we go back to the Fedrus, the sort of paradigmatic erotic instance is conversation. And it's conversation ultimately between a lover and a beloved. And in a good erotic conversation, what you realize is the ideas belong to the participants as individuals, but belong to the participants to the extent that they are in this shared relationship, to the extent that they are somehow participating in being erratically engaged with each other. And so that's the way I would tend to think
pj_wehry:
Uh.
james_l_kastely:
about it. Yeah.
pj_wehry:
I want to make sure I'm tracking with you.
james_l_kastely:
So
pj_wehry:
And I think I am. Would an example, would an example, good example be,
james_l_kastely:
Yeah.
pj_wehry:
so I have, we talked about at the beginning, I have five kids here at the house.
james_l_kastely:
Yeah.
pj_wehry:
And there are certain days where all I want to do is just go in a room by myself and not be interrupted, right?
james_l_kastely:
Right.
pj_wehry:
Even if they don't say anything, and even like my wife works from home, I work from home. So like my wife is around and it's a multi-generational
james_l_kastely:
Mm-hmm.
pj_wehry:
house. And just even if they're not asking anything of me just by their very presence
james_l_kastely:
Bye. Bye. Yeah.
pj_wehry:
There are demands on me right in a way that if I was just in this house by myself
james_l_kastely:
Yes.
pj_wehry:
I I would not be challenged right like the fact that there is
james_l_kastely:
Thank you. Thank you.
pj_wehry:
this desire for the other and this even
james_l_kastely:
Yeah.
pj_wehry:
the kind of That the knowledge that they are there and that they are interacting with me that the future holds like, oh man, if I make dinner, I have to make it with them in mind, right?
james_l_kastely:
mhm
pj_wehry:
It's not just what do I want, right? Is that kind of, is that a good illustration of what you're talking about?
james_l_kastely:
Yeah, I think it's actually an excellent illustration. And kids are really helpful that way because you keep wanting to say, well, why don't they do exactly what I want them to do? Why do they have
pj_wehry:
Ha ha ha
james_l_kastely:
this kind of independence? Why do they have this independence? And you realize, to the extent that they have good independence, it forces you as a parent and an adult to grow. And you want to say, the worst thing in the world would be have a fully
pj_wehry:
Hmm.
james_l_kastely:
obedient child. That would simply give you back an image of yourself that didn't allow you to grow. Inevitably, the challenge is I need to become a better parent. I need to become a more interesting parent.
pj_wehry:
Hmm.
james_l_kastely:
Or I realized I was tired this time, so I didn't attend the way I should have. And you keep saying, well, what happens from all of that is I have a richer life. And you can also see that at 10 o'clock at night, you can say screw the richer life. All I want to do is just
pj_wehry:
Yeah.
james_l_kastely:
be left alone and be quiet and that's an understandable
pj_wehry:
Yeah.
james_l_kastely:
aspect of life You know, uh, one can't be erotically
pj_wehry:
A little too rich.
james_l_kastely:
engaged all Yeah, that's exactly right and
pj_wehry:
Yeah.
james_l_kastely:
And the thing is that this makes kids even more fun this way is You can't predict when the challenges are going to come and be meaningful but you have to be open to them
pj_wehry:
Hmm.
james_l_kastely:
and And that's a hard thing to do It's especially hard thing to do because kids grow. And so often what you're trying to do is respond to a four-year-old as if they were a three-year-old. And the four-year-old is letting you know that that's no longer working. And so you say, oh yeah, now I have to somehow retool myself. But you can begin to see if you can do that, then you have a really rich life. And if you can't do that, you're going to be incredibly frustrated The world is just frustrating your will. It's not doing what you want it to do.
pj_wehry:
Hmm.
james_l_kastely:
The world is not behaving. What you want to say is, I want a world that misbehaves the right amount. If it misbehaves all the time, that's not going to work either. But say, well, what's the right amount? The answer is you can't know that in advance. And so that
pj_wehry:
Hmm.
james_l_kastely:
if you're going to be persuaded to grow as a parent, it requires a kind of openness where your openness is something you take responsibility for, which also reveals something about you. Am I too permissive? Am I too much of a disciplinarian? Well, how do I know that? Well, how does the world respond to you? Well, is there a parent book? Is there a new version of Dr. Spock? that would give me knowledge so that I would be able to function this way. And you'll say, Oh, wait, there's no knowledge. All I can do is try to be open and continually reconstitute myself so that I develop a richer sense of what being a parent is. And I can't know that prior to the experience of being a parent. And, and you would, you know, life if you could read a book that says, hear the rules, but you can't. And so, but you can read books that all of
pj_wehry:
Yeah.
james_l_kastely:
a sudden say, you know, wait a minute, you haven't thought through this thing carefully enough. Or the parts of yourself that you recognize as having too easily moved to a position. And so what I began to realize. back to the title of the book is that what persuasion is really about is that I call it an action and event. It's this action event in which subjectivity, who we are, gets continually transformed and we grow. And the reason that it's an action and event, it's this peculiar thing where persuasion requires you to do something. You can't be passively persuaded. feel compelled to do it. So it's one of these odd things where freedom and necessity seem to be joined and and and because they're joined you keep getting more insights to Who you are into taking responsibility for the values that structure your life. I mean, which is, if you think about it, one of the
pj_wehry:
Hmm
james_l_kastely:
tasks of an adult is you enter adulthood with a certain set of values that you've kind of taken over. But if you're really lucky as an adult, you're able to, a question might sound like too aggressive a term, but at least be open to a reexamination or a deepening of the values that structure you and in practice you're trying to figure out who you are and what are the potential values. And my sense is you only do that if you take pleasure in this. There has to be again an erotic affect effective component. For a lot of people that's not a pleasurable activity. You know a lot of people just say shut up you know things are okay I'm going to get dinner tonight
pj_wehry:
Ha ha ha!
james_l_kastely:
and you know And at that point you
pj_wehry:
Yeah.
james_l_kastely:
appear to be in lucid.
pj_wehry:
And I wanted to ask you, I think there's a good time to transition to a really interesting thing you mentioned in the preface, that there are two main challenges to this idea of persuasion.
james_l_kastely:
Mm-hmm.
pj_wehry:
And one is coercion, right?
james_l_kastely:
Yep.
pj_wehry:
Which of course is like, okay, you're talking about how great it is that we change, but what happens when we have freedom and necessity come together and I'm being persuaded of something wrongly. And then also, how does persuasion
james_l_kastely:
Mm-hmm.
pj_wehry:
figure in, and obviously, I mean, you've been kind of answering this all along, but I'd love to hear more about the post structural movement of figuration into language, the figures becoming what language is all about. But first, please talk to us about coercion. How do we, what is the ethical stance that's necessary with that?
james_l_kastely:
Okay. Okay, this is a really good question because the opposition to persuasion, the opposition to persuasion inevitably assumed that persuasion was a kind of soft power. And so they saw it as something being done to you for the benefit of the person who's persuading you. And so coercion and manipulation are both ways, you might want to say, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to to give you something, in the case of manipulation, that looks like a free choice, but it's really not. In coercion, it's to simply
pj_wehry:
Hmm.
james_l_kastely:
force something on you. So in both cases, what you have are aggressive acts of language, they're abusive language. And what they're attempting to do is by and large, shape the audience to the desired identity that the persuader wants. And so when people reject persuasion, they reject it because they are inevitably, themselves questioning the motives of the person who's doing the persuasion. Everybody's been hand. And so as a result of that, one of the things that we tend to do is to say, you know, it's like buying a used car. You know, when everybody's saying, well, I'm doing this for your benefit, this is a great bet. And you're already saying, no, I know what your language is. But what's really going on here is you're trying to manipulate me. a coercive effort. So what I want to say is that philosophically those are not particularly difficult things. Don't do them.
pj_wehry:
Ha ha ha
james_l_kastely:
From the point of view, it's true, right?
pj_wehry:
Right, right.
james_l_kastely:
But from the point, if you flip over persuasion, from my, look at it from the point of view of the person that, that's undergoing the active persuasion, what you realize at that point is it's ethically imperative that you resist. That becomes your point. And so I think that what you argue is, yes, it's simply wrong to create, to manipulate, or to coerce, or to indoctrinate people. And so there's ethical obligations not to do that. But if you're on the receiving end, you also have a set of ethical obligations. And one of the things that you have ethical obligation to critically examine and to resist things which are supposedly being forced upon you. You can see coercion as creating ethical demands in both areas. In a sense, I want to say the ethical demands for the person being coerced are actually harder than the ones for the person doing coercion. You want to say, what is the ethical demands? So that becomes kind of an interesting question from that point of view. And
pj_wehry:
Well,
james_l_kastely:
so, yeah.
pj_wehry:
What what would you call that capacity because for me it it almost seems like you could call that capacity discernment that
james_l_kastely:
Uh. Yep.
pj_wehry:
the the Kind of classically what what that's called when someone is When you're rightly Breaking apart a message in order to discern like okay, is this what I need to receive or is this something I should resist
james_l_kastely:
Right, and you can begin to see that as you take a notion like discernment, it becomes not simply an intellectual virtue, but it becomes an ethical virtue. That you have an obligation
pj_wehry:
Yes.
james_l_kastely:
as a listener to be both open and critical simultaneously to the language that's coming towards you. And again, that also means examining how you're hearing things, not only what's being said, but how you're hearing it. And so you begin to realize these are incredibly complex acts and and you you don't have fixed standards to work from And and that's why you want to say it has to be an ongoing process than simply a one-act thing So yeah, I would think discernment is a good term for one of the ethical virtues that somebody If we're thinking about what persuasion from the point of view of the person undergoing persuasion Needs they need discernment And so that's how I would go on that way. In terms of sort of the post-structural era, where when rhetoric got rediscovered in the 20th century, what happened is, you know, figure was taken over from being something that an individual retort did to simply being a defining feature of language. And in a way, that's a wonderful advancement. What normally happens occurs is persuasion drops out of the equation. It's just as if language is the system that's continually modifying itself as it goes on. And so human agency is simply left to the side. And what I think you can do is you can say, what the post structural world showed us is that acts of persuasion or potential persuasion and acts of rhetoric are just omnipresent. for any language creature. And that one of the things that as someone who participates in language then needs is you need to figure out how you stand ethically and politically to this ongoing sort of figurative operation, which is not necessarily controlled by any individual in a deliberative and purposeive way, but is simply the environment to which we're born. And that's how I think you begin to sort of benefit structural point of view.
pj_wehry:
Would you say that the figures of language and maybe even language itself is the field
james_l_kastely:
Yeah.
pj_wehry:
where this intersubjective persuasion happens? Is that another way of thinking about it?
james_l_kastely:
Yeah, and the way I put it is that this language is not simply, I want to say, a symbolic set of interactions, but it's also effective. That there is an effective or an erotic component to language that is sometimes not fully caught in this whole notion of it simply being the figurative aspect that defines how language is taught. You want to say, the other thing about language, however figurative, is it impacts you emotionally. It impacts you effectively. It becomes one of the places that we engage erotically with each other. And this takes us back to conversation. You might want to say, and this is why I think the Platonic understanding of conversation is really helpful. In a genuine conversation between a lover and a beloved, the conversation is the thing that continues. The participants in the sense are somehow incidental and historical. erratically evolving understanding and language and figure that you hope to participate in and the way you get into it is you literally fall in love. And the
pj_wehry:
Hmm.
james_l_kastely:
interesting thing about the way you fall in love platonically is initially the beloved is not in love. The lover is taken over through some sort of perception. It's the lover who see something, sees the divinity in the beloved. And then what the lover does is talk. And it's only in this conversation that the beloved begins to participate in this sort of erotic exchange. And so, What you, you want to say, here's the terrifying thing that Plato uncovered that he didn't really develop, which means you have to have the good fortune of somebody falling in love with you. Are you falling in love with somebody else? And, and, you know, and that's a tricky thing. I teach Jane Austen's persuasion as a philosophical text that also, involves this problem. And one of the things that's interesting in persuasion, as I try to explain to my students, it's a novel that has to delay a conversation for 220 pages. As soon as the conversation happens, the novel's over. So, you know what I say, what happens, what delays the conversation? And part of its misunderstandings, part of it is the right person not being available. What you find in the novel is, If you have the bad fortune to marry a trivial person, you can't have conversations that
pj_wehry:
Hmm.
james_l_kastely:
allow you to grow, that your life becomes trivial. So you realize, a lot's at stake in this thing. And you know, I keep telling my students, well, what if the person you're supposed to love didn't take this class? What if they took the class next door, then you'd spend your entire life not having the conversation you should have. That should terrify you.
pj_wehry:
Hehehehe
james_l_kastely:
Now the nice thing is there should be more than one person you can fall in love with but but does mean that you are dependent upon That relationship being Maintained in a vital way and again, that's hard to do. I mean that takes energy. I mean that's where the erotic impulse Becomes incredibly important You know, I mean we've all been things where conversations just become sort of wrote and one feels it and And interestingly, I know this as a teacher. When my class fails, it's because it lacks erotic charge, that the material I'm presenting doesn't, I like the passion and engagement that I should have. So it's almost as if
pj_wehry:
Thanks.
james_l_kastely:
the content is identical and what distinguishes the content and what brings it to life for the students. is the erotic involvement of the instructor, which should hopefully produce erotic responses from the students. And that's where education really becomes a viable thing, because it's not information anymore. It's the transformation of a subjectivity. And so this is what you're continually trying to sort of say. This is the component of language that sometimes the post-structuralists don't really get.
pj_wehry:
And I wanted to go back to something you said earlier. I think I understand what you're saying. When you say we can't do this according to fixed standards, am I right in assuming the reason that we can't have fixed standards, you know, in some that's post-structuralism, I understand that, but is because the very thing
james_l_kastely:
Yeah.
pj_wehry:
we're having many times, those standards are what we're having conversations about, right? And so you cannot be persuaded about something
james_l_kastely:
Yeah.
pj_wehry:
that's already fixed. So you, and so you cannot change are set 100% like what you mentioned earlier frozen or set in stone.
james_l_kastely:
Yeah, I think that's exactly right, is that you hold them provisionally,
pj_wehry:
Okay.
james_l_kastely:
which doesn't mean that they're just arbitrary or they can be cast aside, but they're not fixed. And once they
pj_wehry:
Yeah.
james_l_kastely:
become fixed in an interesting way, I want to say logically, you're no longer available for persuasion. Whatever occurs, it's not persuasion.
pj_wehry:
Right.
james_l_kastely:
And this also takes us back to your concerns with coercion and manipulation. There are whole series of things that people might on the outside look like their persuasion, but you want to say, It's fundamentally a different act. It may be pretending to be persuasion
pj_wehry:
Hmm.
james_l_kastely:
But the kind of I want to say developing subjectivity which is at the heart of what persuasion is trying to Support and develop doesn't occur and so this is why it becomes I think a rich concept to rethink what we're doing is and You know, there's there's one of things I like about of Jonathan Lear that I sort of spent some time with, he said, individuals do not occur naturally in nature. The individuals in achievement,
pj_wehry:
Hehehe.
james_l_kastely:
you know, that biologically you're there, but you don't become an individual until certain kinds of things happen. I realize, actually what he's really saying is we are individuals because we've persuaded ourselves that we are individuals. And so that at the core of your identity is an act of persuasion. I have persuaded myself I am who I am. And that's a kind of an interesting thing to think about. And that that activity is ongoing. And the only danger
pj_wehry:
Yeah.
james_l_kastely:
is to think I finally know who I am. And as soon as I think I know who I am, I am no longer available for persuasion. I can be confirmed or I can be irritated, but I can't be persuaded. And as I tell my students, you know, it's a lot easier to be available for persuasion when you're 25 than when you're 70. And that
pj_wehry:
Yeah.
james_l_kastely:
you tend to think, okay, I kind of know who I am. And you will say, at that point, you stopped growing. I realized that the people I began to really value of my senior colleagues were the people who were in their 70s and 80s. And they weren't repeating themselves.
pj_wehry:
Mm.
james_l_kastely:
And that creates a more interesting and complex life. And the reward is an interesting and complex life. I mean, that's kind of, you know, it's just, it's a steal from Alistair McIntyre. It's an internal good. It can only be appreciated by people who are inside the practice. And from the outside, it seems really stupid.
pj_wehry:
Hmm.
james_l_kastely:
If you only value external goods, it's far better to just chase money. And you say, yeah, money is a good. But you can only get the goods of persuasion by participating in the practice of persuasion. They're internal to it. And another way to put it, you can't persuade someone to be available for persuasion who doesn't want to be available for persuasion. Persuasion at that point hits the limit.
pj_wehry:
Yeah.
james_l_kastely:
that's an internal good. And so,
pj_wehry:
Yeah, absolutely. I Dr. Kasteli one, let me say thank you so much for come on the show.
james_l_kastely:
Thank you.
pj_wehry:
Absolutely fascinating for our audience. If you could leave them with one takeaway from this talk today, I there's a lot,
james_l_kastely:
Yeah. Yeah.
pj_wehry:
right? But if you could leave, leave them with one takeaway, what would it be?
james_l_kastely:
I think what it would be is to value responsiveness, to value the capacity to see the world and the people in it and the products that we've made as erotic objects, and that when you engage with them, what's possible is the development of, I want to say, a richer appreciation of what it means to be alive in this world. There are a lot of things you don't have control over, but one of the things is if you can maintain that kind of openness, a certain kind of agency is available to you. That's incredibly valuable. And it's really a function of just simply saying, really following Socrates to say, you know, I really don't know who I am. It doesn't mean I don't know anything about myself. But
pj_wehry:
Right, right.
james_l_kastely:
there are things to learn that I am a mystery. That's a good thing. You know, mysteries are good things. That's why, to some extent, and you can see how mystery novel works, you're always trying to read to get to
pj_wehry:
Ha ha ha!
james_l_kastely:
the end of the book. When you get to the end of the book, you're always kind of sad that it's over.
pj_wehry:
If it's a good one, yeah.
james_l_kastely:
If you think about it, the value of a good mystery is that, you want to say there's an energy and a vitality in the experience that's just pleasurable in and of itself. And in ideas, you would like life to be that kind of a mystery. And I guess if I had to leave anybody with anything, that's kind of what I would say is, savor the mystery of yourself. And that's a good way to be.
pj_wehry:
Savor the mystery of yourself. What a great summary for just an incredible conversation.
james_l_kastely:
Yeah.
pj_wehry:
Thank you, Dr. Castelli. It's been a real pleasure.
james_l_kastely:
Well, thank you. I've enjoyed it enormously too. So thank you very much.
pj_wehry:
Oh, I think you cut out. Ha ha ha ha.
james_l_kastely:
Okay, okay, so I think I just leave now at this. Okay