A Conversation with Andrew Pessin

About

The 60-Second Philosopher:  Expand Your Mind on a Minute or so a Day!

(Oneworld Publications, 2009)

Is it true that that you got your idea for this book when a friend told you about her experiences with “speed-dating”?

Inspiration comes from strange places.   If you’re not familiar with it – and for your sake, I hope you’re not – “speed-dating” is an event where the prospective mates are rotated every few minutes.  At the end of the evening you will have enjoyed – or suffered through – short conversations with (say) 8 or 9 possible partners, at which point you submit to the organizers a list of those whom you’d like to see again.  If your name should appear on any of their lists, then mutual contact information is provided.  As my friend shared her experiences with me – she actually loved it – it occurred to me that the same thing could happen with people and philosophical ideas.  Have some quick encounters – and then decide which ideas you’d like to encounter again, in (presumably) more detail, not to mention presumably more intimate surroundings!

I suppose that some encounters don’t lead anywhere?

The analogy goes surprisingly far, in fact.  Some encounters may be just that brief, and then over.  Others might lead to casual dating, more than a one-night stand but something less than a genuine relationship.  And others might lead to long term, even lifelong, commitments.  And while I can’t speak to how carefully the companies running the speed-dating pre-screen the participants, or make any attempt at non-random match-making, I can assure you that the ideas in The 60-Second Philosopher have not only all been carefully pre-selected from many hundreds of potential candidates, but that they’ve also been groomed and packaged by an idea-professional (namely me).  Moreover I can promise you that the $9.95 retail price is far less than what you’d pay for an evening of speed-dating – plus you get the book to take home and keep!

Is it really possible to present philosophy in 60-second installments?  Isn’t philosophy quite dense, and heavy, and difficult?

Philosophy can get really thick and impenetrable, but it doesn’t have to be that way; it can also be rather light and airy as well.  The 60-Second Philosopher is designed to be accessible.  The chapters are all very short – no more than 350 words apiece – and each chapter is self-contained, so there’s no need to refer backwards or forwards or make any other connections to understand any given chapter.  They chapters also display a nice amount of humor (if I do say so myself).  Philosophy unfortunately tends to get associated with the thick, dark-rimmed eyeglasses of heavy thinkers such as the famous existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre.  But philosophy in fact has a very active and light-hearted sense of humor.   It could just as well be associated with the thick, dark-rimmed eyeglasses of the other famous existentialist Woody Allen.   

You just used a fancy word – “existentialist”.  Is there a lot of technical jargon in The 60-Second Philosopher?

Probably the word “philosopher” is the most technical one in the book.  So the answer is no.  The goal of the book is not to convey a bunch of definitions of technical terms.  It is, rather, to jump right to the ideas themselves, and get the reader thinking.

In the speed-dating analogy earlier you talked about pre-selecting the ideas.  What criteria did you use?

Well, I wanted ideas that were accessible, of course, and such that they could reasonably be presented in 350 words.  But more importantly I wanted ideas that were interesting, provocative, and unusual, ideas that might challenge your ordinary common-sense understanding of the world.  If there’s a theme to the book, it’s this:  that much of what we take for granted about the world around us in fact doesn’t really make much sense, once we start to think about it – and that much of what might, on first blush, strike us as unusual or strange might in fact, ultimately, be true – once we start to think about it.

Now might be a good time for some examples.

I’m so glad you brought up “time”.  It turns out, in fact, that one of the most common features of our ordinary experience of the world – the passage of time – actually doesn’t make any sense.  In fact, time doesn’t really exist at all.  (Read the book to find out why you should believe this!)

Well that is an interesting, provocative, and unusual thing to suggest.

And there’s more!  It can also be shown that nothing actually causes anything, that physical bodies don’t really have colors, that you are not what you eat, that there’s more to the world than what there is, that you cannot actually see distances, that we don’t understand what understanding is, that intolerance is a virtue, and that, in fact, despite all its miseries (including speed-dating) this is the best of all possible worlds.  Also we have very convincing reasons both to reject and to accept that we have free will, both to identify and distinguish our minds and our brains, and both to believe and disbelieve in the existence of God.

For a short book it sounds like The 60-Second Philosopher covers a lot of ground!

Indeed it does.  The book manages to include a healthy sample of some of the major questions, problems, issues, and ideas that have been keeping philosophers busy, in some cases, for nearly three millennia!  The chapters cover a wide range of topics, from mind to body, from space and time to causation and free will, from knowledge and reason to skepticism and the senses, from absolute morality to relative morality to the complete rejection of morality, from God to godlessness, and more.

Wait a minute – it sounds like The 60-Second Philosopher contradicts itself quite a bit.  It covers everything from absolute morality to the rejection of morality, from God to godlessness, and offers, you noted a moment ago, reasons both to reject and accept our free will.   How can it do that?  Don’t you have to make up your mind?

Well, as the philosopher in me might say – you do and you don’t.  The conflict of opinions is something to worry about when it comes time to decide on some issue, for at the time all conflict must be resolved.  But until that time you generally find, in philosophy, that an awfully good case can be made for one answer and an awfully good case can be made for an opposing answer.   And that is precisely how things ought to be.  For only after you’ve seriously considered all sides of an issue, seen all sides in their strongest lights, could you be in a meaningful position to decide between them.   The philosopher in me sees his job in this book as helping you to see the other side of things – the side you might not have thought of, would never have dreamed of – and not as telling you precisely what to think.  That’s your philosopher’s job.

Are there any ideas that you personally have made a life-long commitment to?

There are more than a few.  Fortunately they all get along famously.  And even better, they don’t seem to mind when I flirt with their competitors!  And while I get the deepest satisfaction from my serious long-term relationships with these ideas, who can deny the thrill of encountering a brand-new idea – in a coffee shop, or better yet, in the bookstore?

In all this you haven’t quite said anything about why one ought to become acquainted with philosophy in the first place. 

Even if time were real, there wouldn’t be enough of it to do real justice to this question.  But my expertise in doing philosophy in 60-second chunks might help me in doing some brief injustice to this question.  Basically, philosophy changes you – for the better.  It makes you deeper, richer, and more interesting.  It may or may not bring you happiness but it will bring you greater appreciation for whether happiness is something ultimately to be valued.  Moreover, when an idea gets into you it affects not only how you act and think but also how you perceive the world around you.  There’s the legend of the fish who swam around asking every sea creature he’d meet, “Where is this great ocean I keep hearing about?”  We are that fish, and philosophy will help you suddenly become aware of this great ocean we’re in.  It’s a vast ocean, deeper than you can imagine, and more beautiful than anything you’ve ever experienced.  It’s just oodles of fun to splash around in it.  And best of all – you don’t even need a wetsuit.