Elizabeth Oldfield speaks with philosopher Sam Kimbriel in bonus episode of The Sacred recorded at the 2024 Aspen Ideas Festival. 28/08/2024
In this episode, recorded at the 2024 Aspen Ideas Festival, Elizabeth Oldfield chats with Philosopher, Sam Kimbriel, about how nature shapes his worldview, the growing loneliness epidemic, and the power of vulnerability in friendships. Discover why philosophy is more than just an academic exercise—it’s a tool for thinking deeply and living fully.
Sam Kimbriel is a political philosopher, author, and founding director of Aspen’s Philosophy & Society Initiative.
What is sacred to you? Sam Kimbriel’s response
Elizabeth
Sam, we’re going to dive in with a juicy question, which you, as a philosopher, will maybe be less scared of than some, which is, what is sacred to you? What are your deepest values?
Sam Kimbriel
I mean, it’s a lovely question, and it’s actually really delightful to be able to have this conversation. It’s very different than I think that the normal audiences that I’m interacting with are often going the other way, where the sense of something that has weight or depth or value is, I think, there for people, but more alien. And so, a lot of my interactions are with people who are trying to pull that to the surface and elicit and being able to just talk about it much more directly, and frankly, just seems really fun to me. So, we’re in Colorado, and I live mostly in DC, but grew up here, grew up at 9000 feet in the mountains, and I’ve thought a lot about how much the kind of quiet presence with nature that was there from the time that was very small, I think, has continued to shape my consciousness in all kinds of ways. And I think one of the key ones is, I know a lot of people who sort of seem to go through life accounting things kind of in relation to themselves in a certain way. And for me, it’s always been the opposite where, the center of gravity is obviously in the world. And whatever it is has a kind of weight, and intensity, and life, and it deserves respect of a certain kind. And this is not like the level of like conscious thought. It’s like sort of one level below that, where it’s just, I know that the world is like that. It feels like that instantly. And so, we can say a lot more about that, but I think it ties to nature pretty closely.
Elizabeth
One of the ways I think we can get to these deeper sacred values is when we have big decisions or forks in the road in our lives, sometimes we can feel the tension of it. We you know, we might have to make a choice, and it feels like if we make a choice against what is sacred to us, we’re compromising something deep within us. Does anything come to mind when you think about the decisions that you’ve made in life, that that sense of nature has helped you orient yourself, whether you’ve actually compromised or not? Because we’re not always loyal to the things we hold sacred.
Sam Kimbriel
Very true. I think that’s lovely. It’s very beautifully put. And I actually was thinking in an essay that I was writing recently about the kind of very beautiful but also kind of cliché ending to the Rilke poem about the bust of Apollo, where the entirety of the poem is kind of walking through the kind of intensity of the experience of seeing this ancient bust. But in the last line, it reverses from talking about that. And so, it says, “There’s nowhere here that does not see you”, and line break, “You must change your life.” And I think for me, that does go together. So, the sense of a world that has weight and intensity and life to it, I think it’s something that a lot of people don’t feel at the moment, or they do feel it, but they’re somewhat alienated from it. Like they’re trying to figure out why there’s an emptiness there and trying to figure out where they can find that again. But I think those two things go very closely together, which is that if the world has weight to it, it also has a demand, and that demand does have a grain to it, like a pathway through which you can understand. I mean, you can go many places, but if you go here, you cut against something that deserves, a kind of real sense of reverence to it.
Elizabeth
Yeah, in very simple terms, it sounds like you feel like you are in a relationship with the Earth?
Sam Kimbriel
Oh, yeah. I think that’s right. Well, we’re not just talking about nature, actually, I think about this, with people, also. And when we’re talking about nature, we’re not just talking about trees, I also think about mountains, but also planets. The world exists, and that’s incredibly confusing. I have a friend who teaches philosophy at Cambridge, and one of the things he always says to get his students to understand the beginning of philosophy is he wants them to realize, hey, what if the entire cosmos, like the cosmos as we have it is mountains, and planets, and fish, and skyscrapers. But he’s like, it could have been something else, like the entirety of the cosmos could have been little pink balls, why is it not that? And I do think that there’s something that the depth of the world sort of has, like I said at the beginning, a kind of center of gravity in it. So, learning the habit of attentiveness feels really significant.
Childhood, the sublime, and a draw to philosophy
Elizabeth
Yeah, it’s triggering in my mind, I’ve just been sitting looking at the mountains reading Rowan Williams’, The Passions of The Soul, which I would recommend to everyone. It’s one of the best books I’ve read in the last five years. But he breaks down these twin temptations, these twin postures. I write about the seven deadly sins; he’s sort of writing also about the seven deadly sins tradition. And he groups them into these two reactions to the world, one of which is aggression or fear. And under that, you kind of get wrath, and it’s a pushing away of the world. And the other, in which lust and greed and gluttony sit, is the desire to consume the world, to make it only in relation to ourselves. And the kind of freedom of the soul that he’s talking about, in this tradition, is to sit in a space which is neither of those. It’s contemplation, it’s acceptance, it’s relationship, not needing to push away or to bring into ourselves, but to just hold the tension of being different but connected and related. It’s not really a question, it’s just what it made me think about.
Sam Kimbriel
It’s beautiful. Some of my earliest memories are in the house I was raised in was kind of at the high Piedmont, like high foothills. And then there were just big valleys, and then you get up into the Colorado Fourteeners, like the really high mountain peaks. And we’d get these thunderstorms and snowstorms that you could see just coming straight off the high peaks and then down into the valley. And, you know, in 20 minutes, it’s just going to hit the house.
Elizabeth
Like everything’s coming towards you?
Sam Kimbriel
Yeah. And I was back up there fairly recently, and one of the big trees that I remember from my childhood was struck by lightning, just like, right off the back deck, and you can see it splinter everywhere. So, the danger is real. It’s fascinating though, my experience of that landscape, and other things too like, at some point, my parents were like, ‘Oh, we’re going to get another dog’. And I later learned that the reason was because one of the days when my siblings and couple cousins had been playing out in the driveway, we came in, and five minutes later, there was a mountain lion in the driveway. And my parents, I think, sensibly, didn’t say, ‘You can’t play outside anymore’. They said, ‘Okay, we’ll get another dog’, so, the kids have some kind of chance of this. But what these experiences have given me, in my day job stuff, I think that there’s a tendency that I see in a lot of writing and popular culture and media where people sort of filter the world via threat, like in the kind of first list that you’re describing. So, it’s like things that are kind of amenable to your desires are good, and things that cut against them are intrinsically bad. Whereas, you know, the storm example doesn’t fit that, it’s threatening, the danger is genuinely real. Also, for me, every aspect of my experience then and now, as I remember, is that it’s important, like, it’s beautiful, it has weight to it, it’s not something should be rejected. It also doesn’t necessarily benefit you.
Elizabeth
Yeah, Kant talks about it as the sublime, doesn’t he? There’s that sense of, like, coming to the end of our control or, another way of thinking about it, is the realization of our own limits and our smallness. Even though it can scare the crap out of us, also, something feels right about it, right? It’s like the right sizing of us in relation to the world. I want to hear a bit more about that childhood was there this sense of the wildness, and the presence of the natural world as not something tamed, not something disenchanted. Were there other big ideas around? Religious, or political, or philosophical, in the air that formed you?
Sam Kimbriel
I mean, that’s interesting. So, the discussion that we’re having is very much about this kind of, deeper, natural part. But the contrast of that is just tons and tons of family turmoil in the middle of that. And it’s interesting, I’ve talked to a couple of friends about some of those experiences. And myself and all three of my siblings have taken this very like, deep, humanist, sometimes religious, sometimes very philosophical path and the question is, why. Why is it that, given a lot of the much harder, fairly traumatic parts of all three of our lives, did that not end up leading to kind of a more jaded? And I don’t fully know. The like sense of a quiet confidence that the world has beauty, even though it’s painful. Like it gets in at a level that you don’t always know how to articulate where that comes from, or what it means. And so, I don’t know. This is part of the mystery.
Elizabeth
And ideas, philosophy has been the thread of your life. What’s your earliest memory of thinking that might be something that you needed to follow?
Sam Kimbriel
Okay, so my earliest memory and my mom’s earliest memories are different. My mom’s earliest memory is of me, before I was able to read, probably at three years old, just sitting in the corner with a book open but just staring at it, thinking. So, no aspect of my subsequent life has been a surprise for her! My earliest memory was, I mean, you know, there were a lot of deep memories of thinking that I found beautiful, but there was a lot of school I didn’t love. But I remember, in undergraduate, my first proper philosophy course, like two weeks in, there was a lecture about Hume. And I remember just sitting somewhere, not looking at the class, and had understood the point in the first two minutes, and then was kind of trying to push the teacher on all these other things. And then I looked over and realized that the whole class had been lost for 40 minutes. And I thought, oh, that’s like a useful insight like this comes very intuitively to me.
Elizabeth
Yeah, like I’ve found my thing.
Sam Kimbriel
Exactly. But I’ll just say, the thing that really drew me to philosophy, and the kind of philosophy I do is very tied to Plato. That there’s a sense of that idea that the world has both a finitude to it and an infinity, and that’s a massive, confusing thing, and who knows how it works. But however you’re going to do it, those two things have to go together in the end, and you need to pursue that question very seriously.
Explaining Platonic philosophy
Elizabeth
Can you say more about that for me? Because I only know Plato from aphorisms, and I imagine a lot of people listening will not have loads of frames of reference for it. So, take us down a level, in terms of understanding.
Sam Kimbriel
Yeah sure. The stereotype of Plato is that this world’s rubbish, you need to ascend out of the cave to some other totally different thing,
Elizabeth
Kind of ideal forms?
Sam Kimbriel
Exactly. Get rid of the body. Just withdraw into a kind of rationalism. Every aspect of that story is false and just sort of really misunderstanding. I think Plato is actually a very sensuous philosopher. There’s an aspect where, I think his feeling is, when you encounter the world, it has a depth for it that is extremely difficult to account for. And you can go your life skimming the surface and grabbing things as you will and fulfilling your desires that way. But that will be unsatisfying, because you also have a depth to you. And so, if you want to live the philosophical life, it doesn’t have to happen, but it is the one where you say, I’m going to take those depths to their full seriousness. My favourite passage in all philosophy is this passage in his dialog called Phaedrus, where he’s talking about Eros, love and self–control. And it’s actually the only passage in ancient philosophy that I know of where self–control is seen as a bad thing. Usually, it’s like you should be on top of yourself, you should master yourself. And he says, no that’s fine for certain things, but the most important things involve having to go mad. And so, he says, poets have to go mad. The muses descend on them, and they start scribbling. They don’t know what they’re saying, but they know it’s important. Priests in the mystery cults, they go doing these things with white linen, and they don’t know what they’re doing, but they know that it’s important. And then lovers get ripped outside of their own souls, totally beside themselves, and they don’t have any idea what they’re doing, but they know that it’s important. And he says philosophy is like all of these, but especially like the last one. And I find that just very, very moving and resonant, because it’s this idea that we’re not just trapped inside ourselves, we’re actually in the world and getting pulled out into it by elicitation of what we encounter.
The problem with philosophical studies: how can we live more philosophical lives?
Elizabeth
Wow. So, you have made a very strong case for the beauty of the philosophical life. When I think about kind of public conversations, and our common life, and what’s forming our cultural stories, that’s not the story I hear about philosophy, particularly, I think, in the UK. There’s a very strong analytic philosophy tradition, people kind of think of the great French philosophers as having some things to say that might be applicable to our lives. And people like the idea of Nietzsche, or whoever their kind of favourite guy, always a guy, is. But now the idea that philosophy, which obviously means philosophia – love of wisdom, could actually help us be wise. I think it’s changed slightly in the last few years, because, particularly in the Covid–19 moment, suddenly ethics became really live. It was like a live ethics seminar. Who are we going to trade off? Which freedoms are we going to sacrifice? How are we going to choose this? And a bit more now with the AI conversation. But in general, it’s not where most people go. What’s the disconnect there? Why is it not taking up its place as maybe you think it should be helping us think deeply and well? What does it mean to flourish?
Sam Kimbriel
Yeah, so first of all my day job now is at Aspen Ideas Festival, and I run a research centre in public philosophy here. And that involves both the kind of stuff I do as an academic, but it also involves trying to figure out, what is the culture thinking? How does that work? What is the kind of deep current of what’s going on? So, I’m not really a partisan for the discipline of philosophy, specifically, I am a partisan for the idea that life is philosophical and that’s true of every person. Actually, just one quick story. So, I was with a friend here in Colorado, right before Christmas, she had just finished at Yale. And we were just having conversation about, like, this sort of thing, and the waitress interrupted us and just said, ‘You know, I just wanted you to know myself and this other waitress, we’ve been eavesdropping for the last half hour, and what you’re talking about is so moving. It’s exactly the kind of thing that I’m constantly asking and trying to think about and have no one else to talk to about it, and it, would it be okay if we sit and talk to you for 20 minutes?’ And there’s something of that that I feel really moved by, like the meaning of life, how did we end up here? What is the world? What are humans? How am I supposed to live? These are actually inheritances of humanity as whole. And we do need ways to ask them seriously.
To the question about the discipline of philosophy. I have such contrasting emotions about this. On the one hand, I think philosophy has really done its duty poorly. Like it’s taken that, most important human inheritance, and then pulled it into an insular, small game that’s very technical and involves people with graduate degrees. And I think that is done in bad faith in many ways. I think if you take the question as seriously as it should, it can’t be that insular. On the other hand, like with a Plato passage that I just quoted, many of the most important treasures of our species are hidden in philosophy, and so being able to pursue that with the kind of seriousness that it deserves, like hitting that like deepest or most maximal feature and range of desires that humans have, I think, is actually one of the most important things you could possibly do.
Elizabeth
Yeah, there’s something in there about vulnerability, isn’t there it? Sort of what The Sacred is trying to do is just carve open a little bit of space to ask the question, what is fundamental? What is deep? Who do we want to be becoming? What do we owe to each other? But just doing it in a conversation and saying this doesn’t have to be in a seminar. But I can tell sometimes with guests that either they have no practice of going there, they’re not in morally formative communities. It’s often much harder for people who have not been part of religious communities than people who have, just because of the sort of nature of the questions that you’re being asked if you’re part of a religious congregation. But also, this sense I have, where it’s a slight where angels fear to tread type of thing. Because distracting ourselves from these deep longings and yearnings for meaning, and belonging, and intimacy feels safer than taking the lid off and realising just how raw actually being a human is. And what I see in the sort of academic discipline of philosophy is the opposite of vulnerability. Often, it’s just like a blood sport. It is this incredibly adversarial picking apart of each other in a way that makes it impossible to play with ideas or offer something from a more sort of embodied human, intuitive perspective. And it’s this weird flip.
Sam Kimbriel
Okay, so lots of things with that. I agree about vulnerability. Here’s how I put it, if the thing that I was saying is correct, that what we’re talking about here is the most important thing, or, like the actual human inheritance, I think if you open up that sphere, it’s going to be a place of difficulty and pain. And, like the Latin root for vulnerability (vulnus), the capacity to be wounded, and just fraught. There are going to be deep and profound disagreements there. And, in many ways, my view about society, actually at the moment, is that we’ve understood the stakes of that, that once you get down to primary convictions, you can have disagreements that are so severe that it can really rip apart communities. And so, we sort of said, ‘Okay, instead, what we should do is pull back from that’, at least at the public level. People can do that in their private lives. And I think it works differently in the UK than here. I mean, there is a little bit more, of a public space for honesty about primary convictions in the UK and in Europe in general. But the alternative model that I think the US especially has gone in on is, instead of talking about that stuff in public, let’s just talk about water policy. And that means that when primary convictions, or these deeper things show back up, which my thesis is that, like if we are metaphysical in the way that we’re describing, they are going to show back up, we don’t have the skill set to deal with it. So, then it becomes very painful and fraught in all kinds of ways. And, you know, that’s true in the kind of disagreements and dissensions we have. I think it’s also true like in some of the sexuality scandals that you’ve seen in religious communities recently, the like Jean Vanier. You know, these places where they they’re actually pursuing something much less timid and more important in terms of vulnerability, but then that also leaves you open to a lot of really bad possibilities. And so basically, what I would say is, all of this is dangerous work, and that it’s unlikely that we’ll get it perfect. But I think that the alternative of saying we’re just not going to do it, we’re going to pull back from this, ends up being a far more hazardous path.
Elizabeth
Yeah you’ve talked about it, I think, as the two poles of a kind of idealist and bureaucrat, basically. And we have history, the years of religious warfare. There are reasons to be worried that when we get to deep principles and deep values, we might clash. But the kind of let’s just put a lid on it, let’s do public reason, let’s do evidence–based policy, let’s not talk about morality. The thinning of the world that we have made because of that also feels challenging. And I think one of the fruits from that technocratic, bureaucratic posture is this, is this huge backlash towards ideologies of belonging. You see the rise of Marxism amongst young people and, the language doesn’t work, but this sort of new right traditionalism coming through. The longing for a story that means something, right? A frame, a container for how we think about our lives. You are a real champion for ideas themselves. You know, we’re at an Ideas Festival, and the critique that a lot of people would give to philosophers is that it’s all just talking, talking, talking, but what do you do? You know, what does it mean? What does it mean for people who are hungry? What does it mean for the climate? Can you give me your case for why not going straight to practical application, as we are prone to do, is still an important thing to do?
Sam Kimbriel
Yeah, I think that one part of this case is super simple, which is, what are we doing? In Washington DC, where I have my day job, there are all of these organisations that have words like, ‘solutions’, ‘change’, ‘drive’, ‘action’, in their their mission statements. And I don’t know what any of those words mean, like, what are we changing? Why are we changing it? How should it be changed? What are we aiming for? And essentially, I think this ties to exactly what we were just talking about, which is the idea that if we can’t do the big questions, then we withdraw into small ones and into a realm, at least we want, to define as neutral. The issue is, to put it slightly differently, it’s like ends versus means. So there’s a very beautiful speech by MLK that he gives when he gets the Nobel Peace Prize and he says, ‘I’m going to talk about what I see as the one deep, dark cloud hanging over humankind’. And you think it’s going to be about race or poverty, which were his two big issues, and also antiwar. And he does get to those at the end of the speech, but he says, ‘No, the real problem is that we’re living in an age where we’re constantly increasing our instrumental or technical power and totally neglecting our kind of deeper metaphysical or spiritual power’. Which he also quotes, Thoreau, “Improved means to unimproved ends.” And my view, basically, is we’re putting massive amount of investment, including just very practical financial investment, into improving means, and spending almost no time investing to the same degree in ends, or thinking about ends, or trying to understand what ends could be.
And, in a sense, I think basically, we need a societal R&D lab that’s like as serious about those primary questions and take them with as much courage and sort of agency and ambition as the other. The last thing I’ll say is, there’s a Jesuit spiritual director that I read once, who said, ‘You should think of life like a pendulum, where if you swing shallowly inward, you’re going to swing shallowly outward. But if you learn to swing deeply inward, then you can also swing deeply outward’. And I think that is true personally. I think there’s a way that if you have this kind of grounding capacity to sit with the world and know what it is and be attentive to it, it makes your action much easier. It makes it so that when you’re going out, you’re not constantly fighting through a morass. You actually know, you have a precision and a directness in what you’re doing. I also think it’s true societally and communally, where, if you have this capacity for primary reflection and airing your actual deep convictions, but also deep disagreements, you will also get to the point where you know how to navigate things, including the waterboard, with much more ease than you would otherwise.
Elizabeth
Talk to me about the relationship of that kind of ideas first principle, philosophical reflection, and people have different languages for this, but character, virtue, steadiness of soul. Because I sort of know from just having met you for a little bit, that it’s not just writing and thinking that leads to wisdom. How do practices or contemplation, or wisdom paths outside of philosophy, have been offered to be becoming the kind of people that world needs. How do you connect those two?
Sam Kimbriel
So probably the most influential book from the last two or three decades on my own development, is a book called Philosophy as a Way of Life by a French Classicist called Pierre Hadot, who was close friends with but also somewhat antagonistic with Foucault. And his sort of argument is that, in antiquity, philosophy was never a detached enterprise. It was always something that you had to put your own neck on the line for, there’s literally no way to do it unless you are vulnerable. And his basic argument is that, in the ancient philosophical schools, there’s sort of three questions that end up being primary. One is, what is the nature of the world? Two, what are human beings? And three, what does it mean to live? And he thinks that these are all sort of in a cycle with each other. So, as you try out experiments in living, that also gives you a kind of window, or an insight into the nature of the world. And then that also gives you a sense about what humans are. So, you have to run these experiments. And there’s no capacity to be totally resolved about it, it’s always going to be an experiment. There’s no way to settle those questions finally. And so, the different schools end up running different experiments. And so, you get the Stoics who have one version. They think there is a world soul, they think the passions work in a particular way, they think you need to engage in these practices of detachment, fasting, and whatever. And then the Epicureans have a totally opposite view. They don’t think that the world has a deep soul to it. They think that the key thing is to be able to facilitate pleasure in the right way. And they think that human beings don’t have this, like kind of primary contemplative capacity that’s going to come to the fore, if you have detachment. Instead, you need to be engaged in your passions in all kinds of ways. And who knows which one’s right? Either of them might be. And so, they have to run experiments with each other and go into contest with each other and allow that to play out.
And, for me, that idea that we are immersed in the world, you can’t fudge that. I mean, this is also a lot of French philosophy going in here. I mean, you can hear, resonance from Merleau–Ponty and a few other people like that. But that idea that we are going to be alive, like that’s the nature of it. For as long as we’re alive, we’re alive, so you better not dodge it. And how you’re going to do it is not going to be finally settled. But there is a kind of pedagogy for practices which then open you to a particular world. And so, personally, this remains a really important part of my life. You know, practices of attention. So, I mean, you know, since it’s already what we’re talking about, like nature. So, right now, in the mountains, in the next couple of weeks, I’ll spend a good number of hours during the days where I have to be working, also in nature, also writing poetry, trying to pay attention to how tree patterns are working at the moment. Like which trees have been kind of eaten by beetles, and why that’s working, how that’s going. And then also climbing and running I do a lot of backcountry, like that kind of athletic activity feels to me like it’s a mode of attentiveness that opens me to all sorts of things.
How can philosophy become part of the everyday?
Elizabeth
Yeah. And just to hear you talk about it as not separate from philosophy, right? And you talked about the Stoics and the Epicureans, they were working out how their visions of the world engaged with their bodies, right? That is the thing that puts me off philosophy. And I think it’s partly from feminist intuitions, it’s partly from Christian intuitions which wants to take our bodies very seriously. This kind of Cartesian separation of the mind and the reason from our lives. And you’re really helping me kind of put back the body into philosophy. You talk about philosophy as a way of life, for people listening who are like, this is all still a little bit too abstract for me. It all feels a bit too academic. What would you suggest? How could they be asking some of these questions or creating a sort of philosophical spirit or sensibility in their lives in ways that are related to the everyday, what would you suggest?
Sam Kimbriel
So maybe we just start very, very specifically. So, if you think about one of the really big themes at the moment, it’s like technology addiction or very heavy technology usage. And that may or may not be morally coded, right? The question is that is a kind of experiment, right? Like that is already a philosophical experiment of the kind that we’re describing. It’s a way of interacting with the world, like I talked to, a really lovely friend who was a material science researcher, but from Italy, so had a very fascinating childhood, and a close Italian village, but then, like, ends up in these kinds of big international scientific circles. And he said, the deal with a smartphone is, it will give you superpowers, but it will also kill things you love. So, you have to decide if you want to take the deal.
Elizabeth
Wow.
Sam Kimbriel
And, you know, I think it’s like, roughly, right. Like, I mean, today I’m texting with friends still in Britain, like being able to travel also is like this. You know, the range of people that I’m able to keep close contact with so there are genuinely beautiful things about it. On the other hand, it’s incredible how deeply integrated with our lives it is. So, I think one version of philosophical experiment is to say, okay, that’s the one I’m currently running, like one where I have this much interaction with technology in these particular ways, let me see if I can try to integrate a couple that work differently than that into my life. So, try to take a Saturday where you literally won’t look at any screens of any kind, and just see what it’s like, and see what how the world appears to you. And you know, maybe that’s even too much for us. Like, maybe it’s just an hour doing that, but just try to figure out how, how our habits are working currently. And you know, you may learn that there are good things and bad things. It’s probably painful at the beginning.
Elizabeth
Yeah, so this is where the boundary between philosophy, and theology, and spirituality brings to break down. I’m wondering if any of these categories are even any use, because that’s the Sabbath, right? This is the deep wisdom of religious practice; it often has a better understanding of how humans work than the technological world that we’ve set up has.
Sam Kimbriel
And I’ll say too, I think thinking is also an embodied practice. Even in the terms that we’re describing it here, when you’re trying to reflect, it’s because you’ve already been in the world. You’re trying to figure out, wait, why does the air in the mountains smell different? How does that work, and what does that mean? And then, as you generalise it, you try to figure out, how does that implicate us? What does it mean to be in the world? How are these things intertwined? How is it possible that the oceans are this big, like, all these things. And there’s a kind of curiosity that comes directly from already being embodied. I think that the charges against philosophy as a discipline are totally justified though. I think in part because all of that feels so vulnerable. Part of what’s happened, in at least certain corners of analytic of contemporary philosophy, maybe analytic traditions in part. I mean, there are beautiful things about analytic philosophy, but there is also a temptation to kind of detach and insulate in a real way. And I think that is because the questions are so heavy that you say, ‘Okay, let’s not’.
Friendship and relationship as sacred knowing
Elizabeth
Yeah, so let’s follow that thread because one of the things you’ve written about as a philosopher is friendship, and friendship as sacred knowing. And I’m kind of obsessed with connection, with relationship. It’s because of my kind of Trinitarian anthropology, and my view of how we flourish, the more we can lean into each other, the more we can create these deep relationships of interdependence and connection, the more human we are. It’s the Martin Buber things all that’s real, these moments between us. Maybe when you talk about philosophy, I think about formation; who are we becoming? But the world makes that incredibly difficult. We are just being pulled apart, and pulled apart, and pulled apart. You’ve written a little bit about the technical phrase that Charles Taylor uses, ‘the buffered self’, but that might be a bit difficult to translate. But could you say a little bit about the kind of interiority of a lot of how we live and the way that actually makes friendship more difficult?
Sam Kimbriel
Yeah. So, I’ll just say, I think being in the world with other people is incredibly weird and confusing, and that’s just going to be the case in general. And, again, to the pink balls thing, the world is way weirder than we think in general. Like, who knows what it is, and it could be a lot of different ways. And, in each one of those, there are going to be some aspects that are very positive and some aspects that are negative and it’s confusing. And I do think that, in general, if you read anthropology seriously, there is a way that a lot of our species has tended to have, like very, very deep, intertwined communal structures, and those have positive and negative features to them. They mean that when something happens to you, when there is a fire in your house, when you get sick, people are instantly in your life, and it’s immediate and often intrusive. That also often means that your role in society is like pretty clean, and clear, and not ambiguous. And there’s a lot of that that’s really wonderful, and a lot of it that can feel stifling.
So, I wrote my PhD about the philosophical history of loneliness, and yet that’s the book you were referencing friendship as sacred knowing, and I rely heavily on Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor in this. And his kind of argument is that over the past 400 to 500 years, especially within European, or what he calls North Atlantic civilization, you see a divergence from that pattern where you get more and more motivation and social structures that seek to define the space of individuality and to clarify that things from outside can’t get inside. And he thinks that’s true of people, and relationships, and it’s also true of like, sort of broader, cosmic things. So, to take the story that I told from Plato earlier, the idea that poetry comes from muses gets rejected, right? This is just internal genius. It’s you thinking, or you self–expressing, not something from outside that comes in and whispers to you that the world is like this. And he thinks that part of that is unintentional and implicit, and part of it is a very intentional project to try to say, we want to get out of the vulnerability.
One of the things that I think is really funny when I give talks on this stuff, I always talk about how when I moved to Washington DC, I was really fascinated by how no one ever asked anyone else to help them move. So, in most other places in America, the tradition is you buy 20 pizzas, and you force all of your friends to lift your sofa all day. And, in DC, that doesn’t happen, and my guess is it’s because people think I’ve only got so much social capital. I want to spend it on getting this person to help me get published at the Atlantic, not touch my dirty sofa. And I think that’s pretty much the arrangement that we’ve gotten to. The Surgeon General is here, the US Surgeon General, who last year, released a big advisory about the state of loneliness, and he calls it an epidemic, and he thinks that it’s a serious public policy problem. I have some criticisms of his report. I think it’s really wonderful that he’s bringing a kind of actual existential question to public and has done this successfully. I think when he comes to solutions or recommendations, it stays sort of at this level of individuality. And I think at the worst, so this is not the Surgeon General, but now I think that the default mode of friendship, as I see it operating, is that friendship has become a luxury commodity. So, first of all, you become successful, and you publish your articles in the Atlantic. And then secondly, you can buy nice drinks with your friends when you go out. And I think that that has created a specific kind of pain for people that they don’t quite know how to articulate or why it’s there. And so, the question is, what is that and how does that work? And I think the more we can develop a language for what that kind of pain is. And my guess is that it does have to do with material invulnerability. So, if it’s the case that you don’t have anyone that you would trust to move your sofa, it largely also probably means you don’t have anyone that you trust if you get cancer, and there’s something about the aloofness of that life that we find alienating.
Searching for depth through relationship
Elizabeth
So, in my book Fully Alive in the chapter on pride, which is about individualism and community, I write a lot about exactly that example, that if a friend is someone who’ll help you move, and no one helps you move. In fact, I think it’s in my chapter on avarice and the way that money isolates us from our interdependence. And when we are not interdependent, we fall back on transactional relationships, and transactional relationships do not provide intimacy, and therefore deep knowing and deep seeing. I feel like I want to ask you a very vulnerable question, but you have talked about philosophy and vulnerability, so it’s fine. Do you think you got interested in loneliness because it was something that was showing up in your own life?
Sam Kimbriel
That’s a great question and it’s obviously yes. I think that relationships in general feel like the most important part of life to me. And there’s a kind of quiet intensity that I have that just thinks that I’m willing to kind of lose most of the world for that, and the capacity to inhabit them well feels just very significant and important to me. And honestly, there are lots of painful experiences behind that too, where you think, wow, these relationships went really poorly, and there’s the kind of miscommunications. And sometimes even now, I can think of a couple in the last couple years where, after having written a PhD about all this stuff, still, it’s like, wow, that showed up out of nowhere. I had no idea that relationship could just go that way! I also still find it the part of life that I find the most moving and beautiful. I have, some very deep relationships that are now, in one case, two decades long. Another, like 15 or 16 years.
Elizabeth
Yeah, one of the bits of work I’m doing at the moment is with The Relationships Project, which is a little think tank in the UK, trying to make that case that these moments of human connection and human encounter, are the thing. But we have designed systems that delegitimize and devalue them. You quoted something about dreaming of a system so perfect. Can you tell me about that?
Sam Kimbriel
Oh, yeah. This is a T.S. Eliot line from The Rock, where he says, “Dreaming of systems so perfect that nobody has to be good.” And that’s a kind of view of neutrality.
Elizabeth
So chilling! The reason I’m so interested in in this, these questions about value, and formation, and character, and virtue, is this sense that, when we avoid them, we become less fully human and atrophy, we shrivel. But, Dacher Keltner calls it, lots of psychologists call it the default mode network – the kind of immediate, self–gratifying, consuming relationship we have, is being so fed by the systems and processes that we’ve set up. That the idea of just like short–circuiting that system and going for something deeper and longer term, is incredibly difficult. I’ll finish with a question that is really about, how do we cross divides? How do we learn to listen deeply to each other? So perhaps, for people who are listening and are still like, this world of ideas feels alienating, or philosophy is off–putting, what do you wish they understood? What is the misconception that you’re continually having to challenge people that you’re trying to connect with across those deep differences?
Sam Kimbriel
I think a lot about how, what sorts of things show up that are just undeniable, where you don’t think your life works this way, you structure it under different principles, but then it just keeps recurring. And I sort of think what’s happening now is that these, much higher desires that are bigger than just becoming a successful executive at Deloitte, or something like that. Those desires are showing up for a lot of people, and they’re not quite sure what to do with it, but it’s creating, I think, in a backward direction, a kind of threat, and then forward, a sense of fierceness. And I suppose what I’m most focused on in the work that I’m building is creating contexts where people can access or enter those deeper levels in a way where it’s often intense. I want actual disagreement and complication to show up, but also it is not just instantly wounding, where you have the freedom. Some of my most beautiful experiences, I think, have been in teaching circumstances, where people who are not usually given the freedom or leisure to think about these things, end up having real concern, like in all kinds of ways under the surface that doesn’t come out, and then you say, ‘No, you get to think about the meaning of life like it’s your actual responsibility and privilege to do so’. It’s amazing with students, I was teaching at the University of Nottingham for my first academic job, and a lot of those kids are coming out of vaguely Rust Belt kind of situations and have never been given the privilege of that. And the moment that you say ‘No, like, you don’t have to, like, remember, memorise a whole bunch of information. I just really want to know what you think society should be like’, or ‘I really want to know what the meaning of life is for you’. That capacity to elicit that level is something that we all have. And part of the reason why we’ve detached into kind of more abstract things, I think, is because we’re frightened to kind of go into that depth, and having the legitimacy to do so feels really important to me.
Elizabeth
Sam Kimbriel, thank you so much for speaking to me today for the sacred at that Aspen Ideas Festival.
Sam Kimbriel
Such a pleasure. Thank you, Elizabeth!
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