Intensity

08/13/24 • 58 min

2 Listeners

What do skydiving, guitar-playing teenagers, and deep-seated psychic states have in common? They're all intense! In episode 110 of Overthink, Ellie and David untangle the role of intensity in shaping our aspirations, cultural tropes, and political goals. They trace the concept’s history from its tricky roots in Aristotle's theory of change, passing through medieval science and princely romanticism, to the thrills of skydiving and breathwork today. They turn to Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze’s accounts of consciousness and emotion to explore how intensity looks beyond the scientistic impulse to categorize and quantify, and question if intensity is of any help in addressing capitalist acceleration today.
Check out the episode's extended cut here!
Works Discussed
Aristotle, Categories
Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Life
Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will
Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition
Gustav Theodor Fechner, Elements of Psychophysics
Tristan Garcia, The Life Intense: A Modern Obsession
Mary Beth Mader, “Whence Intensity? Deleuze and the Revival of a Concept”
Benjamin Noys, The Persistence of the Negative
Nick Srnicek & Alex Williams, “#Accelerate: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics”
The Bachelorette
Inside Out 2 (2024)
Mentioned Overthink episodes
61 - Self Knowledge
32 - Paradox
107 - Organisms

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Previous Episode

Predictive Brain with Andy Clark

Phantom phone buzzes? Painless mosquito bites? Toy masks flipped inside-out? It might be your brain bringing order to its complex world. In episode 109 of Overthink, Ellie and David interview cognitive philosopher Andy Clark, whose cutting edge work on perception builds off theories of computation to offer an intriguing new model of mind and experience. He explains why the predictive processing model promises a healthier relation to neurodiversity, and they all explore its real-world applications across placebos, road safety, chronic pain, anxiety, and even the accidental success of ‘positive thinking.’ Plus, in the bonus, Ellie and David discuss depression, plasticity, qualia, zombies, and what phenomenologists can bring to the cognitive table.
Check out the episode's extended cut here!
Works Discussed:
Thomas Bayes, An Essay Towards Solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances
Anjali Bhat, et al., "Immunoceptive inference: why are psychiatric disorders and immune responses intertwined?"
Andy Clark, The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality
Sarah Garfinkel, et al., "Knowing your own heart: distinguishing interoceptive accuracy from interoceptive awareness"
Hermann von Helmholtz, Treatise on Physiological Optics
David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature
Alva Nöe, Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness
Anil Seth, Being You
This Might Hurt (2019)

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Next Episode

Envy

Why are you so obsessed with me!? In episode 111 of Overthink, Ellie and David untangle envy, jealousy, and admiration, in everything from Sigmund Freud to Regina George. They think through the role of envy in social media and status regulation alongside Sara Protasi's The Philosophy of Envy, and investigate the philosophical lineage of this maligned emotion. Does the barrage of others’ achievements on social media lead to ill-will or competitive self-improvement? Why do we seek to deny our own envies? And how might Freud's questionable theory of 'penis envy' betray the politics of how we assign and deflect desire?

Check out the episode's extended cut here!
Works Discussed
Aristotle, Rhetoric
Basil of Caesarea, On Envy
Christine de Pizan, City of Ladies
Justin D'arms, Envy in the Philosophical Tradition
Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, “Analysis Terminable and Interminable”
Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which is Not One
Plato, Philebus
Plutarch, Moralia, “Of Envy and Hatred”
Sara Protasi, The Philosophy of Envy
Max Scheler, Ressentiment
Genesis 4, Exodus 20