Innehållsförteckning för Issue 45 - September/November 2024 från New Philosopher

“Novelty has a tendency to make us philosophers.”– Virginia Woolf Constantly looking outwards, humans have crossed continents and oceans, invented technological wizardry, created and consumed artwork, even hurled ourselves into outer space. Our curiosity appears to have no limits. However, this seeking instinct means that it has always been difficult to focus on what’s in front of us, to not be drawn into the pull of ‘the new’ – forever seeking that which we haven’t previously seen or experienced. Ancient philosophers from Cicero to Pliny the Elder wrote of our fondness for novelty and warned of the problems this caused for us. But if the Ancients, without the lure of incessant technological change and the chatter of the online world, found it tough, what chance do we have? Are we…

The human love of novelty could be said to be little more than a desire to suppress boredom. So fearful are our minds of becoming bored that we will latch on to anything to keep ennui at bay. The phenomenology of boredom has been studied by philosophers since medieval times. In his essay, On Tranquility, the Roman philosopher Seneca refers to boredom as “an agitation of a mind which can find no issue because… of the hesitancy of a life which fails to find its way clear.” In other words, we suffer boredom when we are restless for something, but do not know exactly what that is. We yearn to be mentally occupied – to have a goal, a plan, a desire – but nothing seems to pique our interest…

I recently re-read Annie Ernaux’s autobiographical masterpiece The Years ahead of attending its first theatre adaptation in the UK. A personal account, but narrated in the choral ‘we’, it documents Ernaux’s life and times, from her working-class childhood in 1940s provincial Normandy to her metropolitan heyday in Paris as a teacher, mother, and celebrated writer. For Ernaux, the years don’t so much roll by as pop up with a ‘ker-ching’ at the till. They are clocked by a constant procession of the new: new records, fashions, and technologies; new kinds of homes with new kinds of fittings; fads that disappear almost as soon as they arrive, displaced by the next new thing, as well as new personal and political dawnings: new rules, laws, and loves. Ernaux keeps the reader alert…

Daniel Z. Lieberman is a clinical professor of psychiatry and behavioural sciences at George Washington University. Lieberman is a recipient of the Caron Foundation Research Award, and has published over 50 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters. He is the co-author of the international bestseller The Molecule of More and the author of Spellbound: Modern Science, Ancient Magic, and the Unconscious Mind. Zan Boag: Clearly, given your research and writing, we’re going to be speaking about dopamine, but I’d like to look at it through the lens of novelty and the influence of novelty in our lives – why we’re drawn to it and what sort of effect this has on the decisions we make throughout our lives. But first I wanted to find out a little bit about dopamine…

In western philosophy, as in western art, originality is highly valued. Within the academic world, it is a stated prerequisite for a doctoral thesis in philosophy that it should make an original contribution, not simply reproduce what others have already said. Any philosophy PhD will build on what has gone before, but a thesis that contained nothing novel wouldn’t pass the viva voce. The originality requirement here doesn’t necessarily mean startling innovation – it can be met by giving a new way of synthesising older thoughts, or a new interpretation of, or critical attack on, another philosopher’s thought. To make a mark in the long history of western philosophy, though, more is required: you really do have to say something new. According to Alfred North Whitehead, though, “the safest general…

There are so many novel ways to create art these days, from video to digital to installation to photography to performance art. However, you have opted for a more traditional method: paint on canvas. Why did you choose this method and how does to allow you to best express the ideas in your work? I have experimented with other time-based media in graduate school, and photography has always been part of my practice. But, that said, I have a strong love of paint on canvas. I have been lucky and have been able to travel to see museums in various cities in Europe, New Zealand, and across the United States, including Hawaii. What is magical about paint is when you look at the work from afar you see the image.…

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,And sorry I could not travel bothAnd be one traveller, long I stoodAnd looked down one as far as I couldTo where it bent in the undergrowth; Then took the other, as just as fair,And having perhaps the better claim,Because it was grassy and wanted wear;Though as for that the passing thereHad worn them really about the same, And both that morning equally layIn leaves no step had trodden black.Oh, I kept the first for another day!Yet knowing how way leads on to way,I doubted if I should ever come back. I shall be telling this with a sighSomewhere ages and ages hence:Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—I took the one less travelled by,And that has made all the difference.…

Novelty has a very shady reputation, redolent of dime stores, corny songs, and practical jokes. What does it mean, that the most common terms for the new are so hard to use? How does the quality that makes a new shirt or a new friend such a positive experience turn into something almost sinister in the abstract? That quality, of being different from what has gone before, is clearly of great importance to us, though we find it difficult and even embarrassing to give it a name. But the linguistic awkwardness in finding a good descriptive term for the new is almost certainly the effect of a deeper difficulty in coming up with a definition of it. Perhaps there would be a better noun than novelty, one above suspicion, if…

Michael North Michael North is Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Department of English at UCLA. North is the author of many books, including What Is the Present? and Novelty: A History of the New. He has received a Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, a UC President’s Research Fellowship, the Modernist Studies Association Book Prize, and the Robert Motherwell Book Award. In 2012 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Daniel Z. Lieberman Daniel Z. Lieberman is a clinical professor of psychiatry and behavioural sciences at George Washington University. Lieberman is a recipient of the Caron Foundation Research Award, and has published over 50 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters. He is the co-author of the international bestseller The Molecule of More and the author of Spellbound: Modern Science,…

“If you can in one day renovate yourself, do so from day to day. Yea, let there be daily renovation.” These words were reportedly inscribed on the washbasin of Cheng Tang, the first king of the Shang Dynasty (1600-1046 BCE), and the daily reminder emphasised continuous improvement. It is a nice motto to live by, and certainly more romantic than American poet Ezra Pound’s take on it, “Make it New”, which became a catchphrase of the modernist movement. “Make it New” encouraged writers and artists to break from tradition and drive for innovation and constant change. It inspired Marcel Duchamp to submit a toilet to a New York art exhibition to rupture traditional approaches to art and forge a new way of seeing (a trend that has continued to the…

Close your eyes and imagine a new colour. Not a new shade of an existing colour, but a completely new colour, one you’ve never seen before. Got it? OK, good. Now, imagine that we’re... Sorry, what? You say you’re having trouble visualising a new colour? You keep trying, but no matter what you do, every ‘new’ colour you imagine is just some variant on all the other colours you have seen before? Well, don’t feel too bad. After all, you’re only human, so you can only see light within a certain spectrum. If you were a sparrow, a dog, or a bee, you’d be able to see ultraviolet light as well. (Many flowers would look very different to you, and much more visually complex). Some humans can see UV light…

“Everything’s a wheel, turning and turning, never stopping.”– Natalie Babbitt “There is nothing new under the sun.”Ecclesiastes “To most men the new things came little by little and day by day, remarkably enough, but not so abruptly as to overwhelm.”H. G. Wells “There are two kinds of fools: one says, ‘This is old, therefore it is good’; the other says, ‘This is new, therefore it is better.’”Dean Inge “There is nothing new except what is forgotten.”Mademoiselle Bertin “How shall we plan, that all be fresh and new - Important matter yet attractive too?”Johann Wolfgang von Goethe “Human nature is fond of novelty.”Pliny the Elder “There is nothing better fitted to delight the reader than change of circumstances and varieties of fortune.”Cicero “What is valuable is not new, and what is…

100% In every country surveyed, adults ages 18 to 39 are significantly more likely than those 40 and older to use the internet. 73% of adults in India who are younger than 40 say they use the internet, compared with 36% of Indians 40 and older. Similar gaps exist in Hungary, Indonesia, Mexico, and Poland. Differences by age in advanced economies are relatively small. In just over half of these countries, internet use among 18- to 39-year-olds is universal, at 100%. 9 in 10 A majority of adults in all countries surveyed use the internet. Internet users are defined as people who say they use the internet at least occasionally or have access to the internet via a smartphone. In most countries surveyed, around nine-in-ten or more adults are online.…

When Australian breakdancer Rachael Gunn, AKA ‘B-girl Raygun’, kangaroo-hopped across the stage at the Paris 2024 Olympics, never could she have foreseen that her performance would be viewed, and her name shared, by more people than almost any other athlete who competed at the 19-day event. Humans love novelty, and breakdancing – complete with its scissor-kick moves – had never been held at the Olympics before. The human brain is a novelty detector – scanning its surroundings for what’s new and unexpected. We tune out the ordinary and focus on what’s extraordinary, a trait that has held evolutionary merits (there’s little gained in observing a vista of sunflowers when a grizzly bear is approaching). This fixation on novelty is apparent in newborns who will stare intently at a new image…

Michael North is Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Department of English at UCLA. North is the author of many books, including What Is the Present? and Novelty: A History of the New. He has received a Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, a UC President’s Research Fellowship, the Modernist Studies Association Book Prize, and the Robert Motherwell Book Award. In 2012 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. North has published articles on modern art, literature, and politics in journals including Critical Inquiry, American Literary History, American Literature, PMLA and Contemporary Literature. He received the Norman Foerster Prize for the best article to appear in American Literature in 1983. Zan Boag: How did you start investigating this topic in the first place? Why novelty? Michael North: One…

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“It is rare to see a professional economist, in interpreting the past or forecasting the future, quoting what a businessperson or newspaper writer thinks is going on, let alone what a taxi driver thinks. But to understand a complex economy, we have to take into account many conflicting popular narratives and ideas relevant to economic decisions, whether the ideas are valid or fallacious.”- Robert J. Shiller, Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events In late 1929, two weeks before the most catastrophic stockmarket crash in US history, Professor Irvin Fisher, one of the most respected economists in the United States, assured investors that stock prices had reached “what looks like a permanently high plateau”. The esteemed Yale economist suggested that in a matter of months the stockmarket…

“[The] selective concern with the ‘inner drama’ enables the writer or artist to capture the essential feature of human experience; it allows him to penetrate beneath the encrusted surface of ordinary experience to the hidden and unfamiliar significance beneath it. In this way the artist can often make us see the familiar in a new light. As Anaïs Nin writes: ‘It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.’”– Orville Clark The news media has been described as a “time machine” because it is deliberately short sighted. The news media could also be called a “novelty machine” due to its emphasis…

It’s a breezy crisp afternoon in San Francisco. A white car with a spinning dark scanner set into its roof has just turned across the street in front of me. I stop and stare before fully realising why I’ve done so: neither a driver nor passengers are inside. Smoothly, the steering wheel turns of its own accord. This isn’t yet a familiar sight, but it will become one. Two hundred years ago this land was woodland and scrub. Signposts memorialise the rise and fall of industries, neighbourhoods, ways of life. Now driverless cars whine peaceably past billboards boasting that Anthropic’s ‘Claude’, one of a handful of cutting-edge Large Language Models, is “a jetpack for your thoughts”. This is presumably a reference to the effortless ease of science fiction rather than…

newphilosopher.com is an online portal for exploring philosophical ideas on ways to live a more fulfilling life. Read the articles, join in discussions, and watch free online documentaries. newphilosopher.com Flourishing enough I recently visited Japan for the first time. When I got back, and people asked me what I had found most interesting or surprising, I found myself talking about small things... The self that is not a self Existence is suffering. We don’t have to look far to see the truth of this dictum: there’s the news, of course, which is more often than not a litany of tragedies and atrocities... Online store Visit the online store for previous issues of New Philosopher and Womankind magazine, subscriptions, and gift ideas. New Philosopher China The Chinese version joins the Arabic,…

If I could have my babies again, I would do it better. I wouldn’t eat spoonfuls of peanut butter at 3 am after breastfeeding, only to find out two years later that my inconsolable son was allergic to peanuts. I would smell their hair more, and I’d abandon the sleep log that I kept as proof that I could be trusted. Regretful people like me fantasise about re-taking life’s tests, and some of us have a nasty habit of living in years gone by. Not everyone does this. Some people care nothing for the past; half the time, they don’t even remember it. These individuals don’t soak in shame the way I do, although they occasionally give into the “Je ne regrette rien” tattoo. For a person who has to…

In 1887, as construction began on an iron tower, taller than any human-made edifice yet built, a group of prominent architects and artists published an editorial to “protest with all our strength, with all our indignation in the name of slighted French taste, against the erection… of this useless and monstrous Eiffel Tower.” To drive their arguments home, the protestors drew on images of the still nascent Industrial Revolution, imploring the public to imagine “a giddy ridiculous tower dominating Paris like a gigantic black smokestack”, a tower of “bolted sheet metal”. In contrast to this dark picture, the protestors evoked the classic monuments of French culture: Notre Dame, the Louvre, the Arc de Triomphe. It was not, as we know now, a winning argument. Today, nothing is more evocative of…

The Philosopher Plato 427-348 BCE Disorderly tastes In Heaven’s name, Stranger, do you believe that that is the way poetry is composed nowadays in other States? So far as my own observation goes, I know of no practices such as you describe except in my own country and in Lacedaemon; but I do know that novelties are always being introduced in dancing and all other forms of music, which changes due not to the laws, but to disorderly tastes and these are so far from being constantly uniform and stable – like the Egyptian ones you describe – that they are never for a moment uniform. The Scholar Friedrich Nietzsche 1844-1900 Eternal return What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness,…

Dopamine Nation Anna Lembke Digital drugs The world now offers a full complement of digital drugs that didn’t exist before, or if they did exist, they now exist on digital platforms that have exponentially increased their potency and availability. These include online pornography, gambling, and video games, to name a few. Furthermore, the technology itself is addictive, with its flashing lights, musical fanfare, bottomless bowls, and the promise, with ongoing engagement, of ever-greater rewards… The act of consumption itself has become a drug. My patient Chi, a Vietnamese immigrant, got hooked on the cycle of searching for and buying products online. The high for him began with deciding what to buy, continued through anticipating delivery, and culminated in the moment he opened the package. Novelty: A History of the New…

What is your demon? Time. In one of his novels, Douglas Adams described a professorial “Chair of Chronology” with remit to determine if there is any particular reason why one thing happens after another and if there is any way of stopping it. That is a cause I could get behind. What is the most important part of your education? The works of popularisers who have introduced me to new worlds. Most of my online projects have aimed, in a modest way, to help them reach and connect with their audiences. Which thinker has had the greatest influence on your life? If only there were an algorithm for arriving at a ranked list of actual influence on each of us; I’m sure its output would be startling. However, in terms…