Episode 161 - Spontaneity Transcript

[00:00:00] David: Hello and welcome to Overthink.

[00:00:19] Ellie: The podcast where two philosophers bring ideas from the history of philosophy into the present day.

[00:00:24] David: I'm David Pena Guzman.

[00:00:26] Ellie: and I'm Ellie Anderson.

[00:00:28] David: As always for an extended and ad free version of this episode, community Discussion and more subscribe to Overthink on Substack.

Ellie, when you hear the word spontaneity, what do you think of?

[00:00:42] Ellie: I think of my aunt who always has the best tricks up her sleeve. The most fun. Random ideas. This is a person who's kind of hard to pin down, like making a plan with little challenging, but oh my gosh. Once you're in the same place together, you never know where you're gonna end up. Like you might start having a delicious lunch somewhere, then find yourself in a completely different neighborhood going to some show that you didn't anticipate.

Maybe it's like a street performance. You just find yourself suddenly in the midst of, and then ending the night, maybe trying a new delicious cuisine you've never tried before. This is what I think of when I think of spontaneity.

[00:01:24] David: So random fun, auntie. I have friends like that with whom I know if I go out with them, I don't know what's gonna happen for the rest of the night. I don't know what's in store. We could crash a wedding, we could go bar like bouncing, is that bar bar hopping,

[00:01:44] Ellie: Bar bouncing is like one step beyond with friend. You're not just bar hopping, you're bar bouncing.

[00:01:50] David: yes and re-bouncing. But yeah, this feeling that with people who are spontaneous, the world is your oyster and you don't know what's around the corner. I think I also think of spontaneity in that way.

[00:02:03] Ellie: Yeah, and so it's like we tend to associate it with a type of person, I think, and certainly with the type of experience, but types of experiences that we have with certain people. And you know, I think it's definitely the case that we associate spontaneity with romance and excitement. I love hanging out with those people that I identify as spontaneous. It has a positive connotation.

[00:02:24] David: It does have a positive connotation. But earlier you said that sometimes it's hard to make plans with your aunt because she's so spontaneous that you actually can't pin her down to a schedule or an itinerary. And I do think the stereotypical spontaneous person is both really, really fun and outgoing, like you said.

But they can also be unreliable and I would say borderline chaotic, just like so in the moment that you don't know what's gonna happen

[00:02:51] Ellie: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

[00:02:52] David: I think of spontaneity as really encapsulated by the trope of the manic, pixie dream girl. The girl who's just like living in the moment and doesn't know what's the next step in her life because she's so young and fun and spontaneous.

But there you see also the manic potential of the spontaneous p ersonality or character.

[00:03:14] Ellie: And an unpredictability that can have negative impacts on the people around them. And I think, you know, beyond the notion of spontaneous people, I also think that certain environments enable spontaneity and others disable it. And so we shouldn't just limit spontaneous to being some sort of trait that some people have and others don't.

For instance, when I lived in New York, it was much easier to have a spontaneous day than it is living in la, right? Because LA is such a driving culture. You're usually going from point A to point B. Maybe point B is a neighborhood, and you walk around in that neighborhood and unexpected things may emerge.

But in New York it was like, a friend sent me a photo of us getting ice cream in New York back when I lived there in 2014 or 2015, a little bit ago. And I was like, what are those leggings that I'm wearing? And I was retracing the day and I was like, oh, we started off the day at a yoga studio. After the yoga studio, we went down to Chinatown and explored and got ice cream.

And I don't know where the day took us, but I think it ended into the evening. There was like one time, this is actually one of my spontaneous friends that I'm thinking of. One time we went to a spa party after hours in Brooklyn. The spa was open overnight and like somebody was telling me like about numerology and then there was a sound bath and all this type of thing.

And so I think, although that's a story of a spontaneous friend. It's also a story of a place where it's much easier to be spontaneous than it is in la.

[00:04:40] David: I actually have thought about this in connection to San Francisco specifically because two things about urban life in a small-ish city like San Francisco are relevant. One is that people live In very small apartments, and so it pushes people out into parks and clubs and bars.

And so you're often running into like hoards of people that you know, because nobody wants to stay in their tiny apartments. And so there's a lot more social connectivity.

[00:05:04] Ellie: Like in New York.

[00:05:05] David: Yeah, exactly. And the second thing about the urban landscape in San Francisco is that because it's a peninsula, it's relatively small, geographically speaking, so everything is walkable and we have a pretty decent public transportation system. And so not only are you bumping into people that you want to hang out with and didn't expect to hang out with, but then those people might very easily propose like, let's go here, let's go there.

And so you end up like you, at a, whatever you said it was like a spa party wearing leggings. That's not an uncommon experience, I think.

[00:05:37] Ellie: Although I did take a lot of Waymo's last time I went to San Francisco and had some, I had some spontaneous fun at a couple of karaoke bars, in fact. But yeah, I mean, that's easy too. It was easy to take like a Waymo from one place to another in La Waymo's can't even go on the freeway, and so it makes it like hard to actually travel in once.

[00:05:54] David: Yeah. Like we barely have freeways in the city, right? And so the point you made about the built environment is really well taken. And it reminds me actually of my experience growing up in Mexico because I think there are also ways in which different cultures, not just people in places, but certain cultures can privilege spontaneity more than others or in different ways.

[00:06:15] Ellie: Oh, absolutely.

[00:06:17] David: And when I was a kid it was very common for us on Sundays to always do the same thing, which doesn't sound very spontaneous 'cause I knew that we would do this, which is go to the Central Plaza, you know, the town square in our small town in the morning for church. Then we would come back home for a traditional Mexican brunch like menduo or pozole, and then after that we would go back to the plaza in the afternoon for socializing, for watching people and for having spontaneous encounters because everybody from the town would congregate in the plaza on Sunday evenings.

And so some of my most cherished memories of growing up in Mexico have this sense of excitement as a kid. This just like childlike quality of who are we going to see today at the plaza and what are we going to do? And I'm happy that now I live in a place that kind of replicates that in a different way.

[00:07:19] Ellie: And I think this is a crucial insight of urban planning that certain spaces can afford certain interactions, and so the idea that they're certain enabling conditions for spontaneous socializing. This is a core insight that urban planners are aware of. And then we just like I live in a city where that is very hard to come by and everybody kind of knows there's something wrong with it, and yet very little changes.

[00:07:45] David: Today we are talking about spontaneity.

[00:07:47] Ellie: In what ways can our actions and thoughts be spontaneous?

[00:07:51] David: What is the relationship between spontaneity and freedom?

[00:07:54] Ellie: And do revolutions need to be spontaneous? Spontaneity isn't just for manic, pixie dream girls. It's also something philosophers have been thinking about for centuries. It's relevant to a lot of the big questions of science, metaphysics, and ethics. For instance, do spontaneous things happen in nature, or is nature just unfolding according to some preexisting plan?

How do spontaneous actions come about and should we aim to be spontaneous?

[00:08:38] David: For this we are going all the way back to the ancient Greeks as our starting point, and that's because one of the first people to make an important contribution to this topic is Aristotle. In his writings, Aristotle gives us two different definitions of spontaneity. One of those definitions comes from his writings on physics, on inert matter, and another one comes from his biology, from his reflections on living organisms.

So let's start with his definition of spontaneity in his physics. Aristotle is out a few criteria for an event to be considered spontaneous. And here I wanna focus on two of those criteria that I think are particularly important. The first one is that according to Aristotle, a spontaneous occurrence happens, as he says, neither always nor for the most part.

And what he means by that is that it's not common, it's not frequent. A spontaneous event by definition is rare. It is a chance occurrence that happens once in a blue moon.

[00:09:46] Ellie: So you going to the same bar on every Friday night is not a spontaneous event. Even if things we might call spontaneous happen in there.

[00:09:55] David: Yeah, that's right. Or like me going when I was a kid to the plaza. Every Sunday is not spontaneous, but it opens the door potentially for spontaneity. Now the second condition for spontaneity is that it has to be random. So it has to be the incidental outcome of a causal chain.

So maybe in this case it would be spontaneous. If I study at the library all day and then incidentally end up at a bar with the friends that I hang out with that always, get me up to no good. You know, like that incidentally is essential to spontaneity.

[00:10:30] Ellie: And given that Aristotle is laying out this definition in his physics, I would assume he has some more that is natural examples in mind than going to library, bar, or plaza.

[00:10:41] David: Yeah, no, he does. And I mean, I mentioned that he gives multiple defining criteria for spontaneity, and I said I would only focus on two, but now it makes me think that I should bring in the third one that he talks about, which is that spontaneous events are typically brought about by purposeful action or by nature.

And this one is a little bit confusing to us modern listeners. Because of course we think about purposeful action as the opposite of nature, right? Natural processes, like they don't have foresight, they don't happen for any reason. They're just causality unfolding.

[00:11:17] Ellie: Which is usually why we tend to think about spontaneity as separate from the natural causal order, so that like if you think that humans are determined by our brain chemistry, for instance, then you don't think any spontaneous action can happen.

[00:11:30] David: Yeah, everything is predetermined, but that's not how Aristotle or the Greeks understood nature. In antiquity, we had what is known as a teleological conception of nature, which means that everything has a place that it seeks to be in, and therefore a goal that it is pursuing when it is not in the right place.

And so if you think about like rocks want to fall down because that's their natural place. And you also see it in connection to like animals, for example, with their maturation process or with plants like the acorn wants to be an oak tree. That's why it will develop in that particular direction. So in this case, a spontaneous occurrence would be something that is usually teleological, but in this case, happens incidentally.

[00:12:23] Ellie: So this seems relatively intuitive, like an event is spontaneous. If it's unexpected, it has to be rare, random and happen in a unusually incidental non purposive way.

[00:12:37] David: Yeah, and remember that this is his understanding of spontaneity in his reflections on physics. That's very different from the account of spontaneity that we find in Aristotle's Biology where he lays out what is known as the theory of spontaneous generation. Now Aristotle had this fully fleshed out and systematic theory of sexual reproduction, right?

Like the feminine and the masculine elements combine and through sex bring about reproduction. And of course, we know that with animals we can identify sex and use sexual dimorphism and sexual differentiation to make sense of reproduction. But Aristotle was really troubled by the fact that when he looked at the natural world, and especially at the animal kingdom, he saw a ton of animals that don't seem to reproduce sexually.

And in fact, he saw animals where he's like. Yo, is this a boy or a girl? I don't know. Like is this a lady fly or a man fly? I can't really tell. Is this warm a masculine element or a feminine element? Who knows? And so some organisms, and he writes, for example, about insects or just too small for us to really observe sexual reproduction.

And so, he thought that they must be reproducing asexually in one way or another. And today, of course, we know that asexual reproduction is a thing. You probably learned about it in like high school biology, but we have an understanding of asexual reproduction that is not the same as Aristotle's. His theory of asexual reproduction is honestly a little bit weird, but kind of fun

[00:14:25] Ellie: of course it's weird and kind of fun. It's ancient Greek science, you know, or natural philosophy as they called it then.

[00:14:32] David: Yeah. And so basically he says these weird sexless animals or like animals who sex, we can't determine. They basically don't have parents at all. They are born straight from a mixture of water and inanimate matter. And so that's his theory of spontaneous generation, that some animals just like spontaneously burst into existence from some combination of water and matter.

And his primary example for this was the mollusk, which he was absolutely convinced scientifically was born from mud.

[00:15:10] Ellie: Ah, okay. I can just imagine him like taking a look at a mollusk on the seashore and thinking like, did you come from mud?

[00:15:23] David: Yeah, like, you know, they're kind of muddy looking also. So maybe there is some like way in which he's letting his perception of the animals like guide his interpretation of their origins. But he also thought that it made a difference. What kind of matter was involved in the production of different animals.

So, for example, mollusks come from mud. Clams come from sand. And oysters he says, come from slime. So there is this whole like one-to-one of what material element produces what specific kind of animal. And this sounds really incoherent to us because we don't accept that life can come from matter, but this was not an invention out of thin air. For Aristotle, the theory of spontaneous generation was actually quite a popular belief in his time and that different scholars would debate which animals come from which material base.

[00:16:22] Ellie: Those were the fun days. You could just kind of like make shit up.

[00:16:25] David: I know.

[00:16:26] Ellie: Not so fun from like a medical standpoint when they're just making shit up about where diseases come from. But you know, this part at least sounds a little exciting.

[00:16:34] David: Yeah, so like Scorpions, for example, were thought to spontaneously generate from the corpses of crocodiles, especially like the matter being rotting flesh.

[00:16:45] Ellie: That disgusting. Whoever came up with that one had a sick mind.

[00:16:50] David: And so this view held sway for a very long time, like for centuries and centuries after Aristotle.

[00:16:58] Ellie: spontaneous generation view, not the crocodile specifically.

[00:17:00] David: Yeah, but also maybe that one, who knows? And I was reading a book called The Truth About Animals, where the author points out that. Even well into like the 14 and 15 hundreds, all these medical experts would have debates about how you as a scientist could generate these animals by just manipulating and combining material elements in the right combination, almost like an alchemy of biology.

Eventually this way of thinking about the reproduction or generation of animals goes the way of the dodo, and that happens, especially when in the 17th century an Italian scientist showed experimentally that it's just not true because, for example, flies don't spontaneously generate in raw meat in a covered container.

Another nail was put in the coffin by the French scientist, Louis Pasteur in the 19th century, and he did a similar experiment with bacteria in a broth. And so for a very long time, almost a millennium, this kind of explanation was really common for understanding where these organisms came from.

[00:18:12] Ellie: Okay. Well, and this is interesting because the second definition of spontaneity doesn't seem to be spontaneous at all. According to Aristotle's own definition. It's definitely different from sexual reproduction and it seems like unexpected to me that a scorpion would come from the body of a crocodile, but in his day, it wasn't unexpected in a sense that like if this theory was that this is where scorpions came from, and this is where mollusks and clams came from, it wouldn't have seemed rare, random, or incidental.

It just would've been like, oh yeah, this is the way that these species reproduce.

[00:18:46] David: No, that's right. Because what we can say about the reproduction or like the emergence of animals is that it's not rare at all. There is flies everywhere. There are scorpions all over the place. So it's quite a common event. But the important point is that that's why we get to conceptualizations of spontaneity out of Aristotle.

The physics one is rarity. The biological one, I think we can describe as self movement, right? Like the animal sort of picks itself up by its own bootstraps out of nothing, and projects itself into existence in a kind of self creative motion.

[00:19:21] Ellie: Okay.

[00:19:22] David: And so that's where the difference between these two conceptions lie, and there is a way in which these two definitions of spontaneity go on to have very different philosophical and scientific lives.

So I think in contemporary physics, when people talk about spontaneity, which is not all that common, but maybe occasionally does happen, we maintain the physical definition of rarity. What's a really rare event? You know, like something that happens again once in a blue moon, but in philosophy, it's the biological conception of spontaneity that h as an influence down the centuries. For example, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, writing in the 18th century really picks up on the second definition of spontaneity and applies it to the human mind itself.

According to Kant, the human mind is fundamentally spontaneous in the sense that it transforms in a kind of self- determining movement, the stuff of sensibility into our coherent experience of the world. And you know, there are a lot of experts on Kant who have picked up on the way in which spontaneity is a really important element in Kant's philosophy. And I think this is one of the things that makes Kant a really original and important thinker of subjectivity because he recognized that we as subjects add something spontaneously to our experience that doesn't come from the world, that comes from us, and that is the spontaneous power of the human intellect.

[00:21:03] Ellie: Yeah, and that lays the ground for the idea that humans are self-determining creatures. We don't have a fixed human nature or essence because our power of cognition is a power of spontaneity.

[00:21:20] David: Now we come to the question of what it feels like to be spontaneous. A lot of philosophers associate spontaneity with freedom, the ability not to be determined by things outside of oneself. Indeed for existentialist Jean Paul Sartre, consciousness or freedom is essentially spontaneity.

[00:21:41] Ellie: Yeah, and I think this is where some people might be having the question. Well, isn't that just an illusion? I think determinism is a very popular review today, partly, but not entirely because of people like Sam Harris, and I think oftentimes ideas like, well, we know because of neuroscience that human freedom is an illusion, and I have a lot of problems with that type of view.

But I think a possible response here is that that is dependent on the idea that spontaneous or free action is outside the order of mechanical causality. Something that disrupts the causal chain and which therefore seems inexplicable, right? And if you think that that's the case, you might think there is no such thing as spontaneity.

Spontaneity is unconditioned action. But a person who thinks that freedom is an illusion will say there is no unconditioned action. You know, let alone un uncaused action.

[00:22:41] David: And I mean, you can see why this would make the hairs in the back of the neck of a lot of philosophers, bristle. The idea that it's just an illusion because everything is predetermined. The Sam Harris line of thinking.

[00:22:54] Ellie: Yeah, but a lot of philosophers think that too. It's not just Sam Harris and the neuroscientists and people who listen to his podcasts.

[00:23:02] David: but you can see why that would be a threat to people who believe in something like free will or the value of spontaneity. Moral philosophers have a lot of ways of responding to this deterministic position. One of them is to deny that spontaneity is an illusion. So on this view, we really are free subjects because we are spontaneous beings whose actions are under determined by preexisting causes.

So even if I agree that I have a predisposition to always choose chocolate ice cream over vanilla ice cream.

[00:23:36] Ellie: And you were like primed by some scientist to like chocolate, you know, for like on that given day.

[00:23:42] David: Yeah, or by past experience or by subliminal messages, it doesn't mean that I will necessarily make that decision. Now, another response to the deterministic position is to sidestep the issue of whether we really are free or not, and just focus on the fact that we have the feeling of being spontaneous and free.

So this is a much more phenomenological, experiential answer to the question of quote unquote free will. And here the feeling of spontaneity is the feeling of freedom and that feeling is all we really need to get freedom itself of the ground, right? Like in a sense, if you feel free, you kind of are free.

[00:24:24] Ellie: Yeah, I mean, that's my view. I think the whole debate about determinism is free will and illusion is first off, just very uninteresting. And second off, unrelated to our everyday lives, like we have to make choices. Making choices feels difficult, and it feels difficult because we feel free to make them right.

And so I wanna talk here about a recent philosophy article by the delightful thinker, Jonathan Gingrich, which offers a really interesting account of this feeling of freedom. He calls it, and the reason I say it, like, I mean, he's delightful for many reasons. I've hung out with him a number of times. But one of the reasons that I call him delightful here is because he describes this in an actual peer reviewed philosophy article in a fancy journal as the feeling of being free as a bird.

[00:25:07] David: Aww, I like it.

[00:25:08] Ellie: Yeah, it's great.

[00:25:10] David: Spontaneously generated bird,

[00:25:12] Ellie: What,

[00:25:13] David: a spontaneously generated bird.

[00:25:15] Ellie: okay. No, David.

[00:25:17] David: Ellie, that was such, that was so good.

[00:25:19] Ellie: Your jokes lately have not always been hitting. I'm just gonna say it. I'm just gonna say it. Okay.

[00:25:24] David: How dare you? How dare you?

[00:25:25] Ellie: Maybe you're spontaneous. Anyway. Okay. So he calls this spontaneous freedom, which is the freedom of openness and well spontaneity. He notes that this is what many of us are referring to when we talk about freedom in our ordinary lives.

But discussions within moral philosophy have tended to overlook spontaneous freedom. Instead, they tend to focus on the freedom of being in control of yourself. Freedom as autonomy. Perhaps that is rational self-governance.

[00:25:57] David: Boring.

[00:25:58] Ellie: Exactly. I mean, that stuff is all well and good to be sure. No shade.

[00:26:03] David: It's like, oh no, let me walk that back. Let me walk that back for my friends who work on it, I like it, but maybe not as much.

[00:26:08] Ellie: No, I do think that it's all well and good, but I agree with Gingrich that we should also be asking as moral philosophers, what do people feel when they feel free and what do they want when they want freedom? And he says that when we talk about freedom in these ways, there's no requirement that your activity is uncaused.

Instead, it's a matter of your activity, feeling unplanned, right? Your choice to get chocolate ice cream instead of any other flavor, it feels unplanned. It feels like you're making that decision at the moment that you enter the ice cream shop, or you stand in front of the counter, and that's really what we mean here.

Our activity could be determined by the laws of nature, yet still be experienced as spontaneously free. And we experienced spontaneous freedom according to Gingrich, when we experience our activities as arising out of ourselves, but not as planned, scripted, or deliberatively settled in advance. We didn't like have some decision making process about chocolate versus this other one.

We just kind of, you know, chose it. We have a sense of openness and possibility here, and that involves the sense of not knowing what the future holds and not really being concerned to come up with a plan of action for it.

[00:27:25] David: Yeah, like you're crazy spontaneous aunt, that's all of us.

[00:27:28] Ellie: I didn't call her crazy,

[00:27:32] David: Sorry, Ellie's aunt. I did not mean it. I meant it as in unpredictable.

[00:27:36] Ellie: bless her, but she doesn't listen to the podcast.

[00:27:38] David: Oh, but, so yeah, this goes also to the heart of the problem with traditional conceptions of free will is like completely outside of the causal structure of nature.

Where it's like, no, nothing is completely outside of the causal structure of nature 'cause nature is all there is, including us. And I think when you have that definition of free will, then you get into trouble with like, you know, we always act out of reasons for purposes out of desires, right?

Like, there are a lot of things that influence our decisions. It doesn't make them on free.

[00:28:10] Ellie: I think his point about spontaneous freedom is that we're actually not acting out of reasons with these decisions, or at least it doesn't feel that way.

[00:28:16] David: Yeah. Not, but like, my point is I'm using reasons here as like one example of many causes. So like the fact that there are influences on us does not automatically negate our freedom. That's my point.

[00:28:27] Ellie: Okay.

[00:28:28] David: I think this is one way of splitting the difference between freely willed activity and scientific understandings of human beings as part of the natural world because we can accept that humans are part of nature, that we exist in a system of causes and effects, and yet acknowledge that phenomenologically speaking, we experience a difference between actions that we choose and those that we don't.

Subjectively, there's a huge difference here, right? Like there's a big difference between me screaming because I want to scream and me screaming because somebody i s inserting a dagger into the side of my torso or dropping a 10 pound weight on my toe, right?

[00:29:12] Ellie: really went hard with that one, David.

[00:29:15] David: I know I got carried away.

But, you know, it's, it's a, it's a meaningful difference whether it's self originating or caused by something other than you. And yes, what we want to protect is our experience of the feeling that we are indeed the source of certain actions.

[00:29:33] Ellie: Yeah, and I think that's part of what's really interesting about this argument to me, is that he is claiming the value of spontaneous freedom. And he notes that a longing for spontaneous freedom is by no means the purview of the wealthy or privileged. So you might initially think, okay, you know, who gets to experience spontaneous freedom?

 The flanner walking around the city dressed up in their fancy clothes, but Gingrich contest this and says, no spontaneous freedom isn't just some luxury, it's actually a widespread feature of human life. And he uses the example of Mohammed Ashraf from Aman Sethi's book, A Free Man. Mohammed is a day laborer in Delhi with a strong desire for freedom, a spontaneous freedom in solitude, specifically or Azadi.

Spontaneous freedom is desirable because it allows certain kinds of artistic creativity to flourish and the capacity for genuine novelty. And this requires material, social and cultural resources, right? Because spontaneity is a good, and it requires these resources, spontaneous freedom poses a political problem.

It's hard to experience it when you're experiencing poverty, for instance.

[00:30:51] David: This is very interesting to me because I think politically we often focus on the problem of freedom in terms of the freedom of expression. Am I free to express myself freely? But this phenomenological account of freedom as a feeling that is embodied and lived should. Lead us to pose a question of what material circumstances need to be in place for different subjects to experience that feeling of freedom.

Right. And there's a difference between the feeling and the way in which typically we think about free expression.

[00:31:21] Ellie: like it's not necessarily a question of first Amendment rights, like freedom of speech. And I think that's really compelling because one of the material resources we need is safety. The basic sense that in moving around in public and private space, you don't feel that your person is in danger.

[00:31:38] David: Well beyond that, I think we would also need enrichment and stimulation, right? Because bear life is not enough for the feeling of freedom as we know from, horrific political circumstances like imprisonment and things like that. And so I would say that we also need social realities that encourage us to act on that feeling of freedom.

[00:32:00] Ellie: Those affordances that I mentioned earlier in talking about urban planning, but we might wanna expand those beyond. So like what sorts of possibilities for unplanned action do you have? There have to be like certain actions that are available to you in order for you to undertake those, even in unplanned fashion.

[00:32:15] David: Yeah. And I also wonder about the role of community here as one of those conditions that enables spontaneity social connection, encountering others. Because I think we often draw inspiration, you know, for our spontaneous activity precisely through our encounters with other people, even if, like in this novel, for example, character was looking for solitude. As we've talked about in our episode of loneliness, there is a difference between solitude and loneliness. So you need connection one way or

[00:32:45] Ellie: You enjoy your solitude a lot more if it's like on the basis of a robust community. Okay. So I think this gets us somewhere in thinking about why spontaneous freedom is worth wanting. But I also wanna note that that doesn't mean spontaneous freedom can't be dangerous. It can absolutely have a dark side.

And I think this takes us back a little bit to the Manic Pixie dream girl trope. And I think an example that came to mind for me here. Is related, although it's not quite manic, pixie Dream Girl and it's this episode of the TV show Girls where the character Marnie, who is definitely identified as like very type a, very organized, plans her life, sort of uptight.

She reconnects with her ex-boyfriend Charlie randomly, and they end up having the most adventurous day ever. They end up going to some fancy party. She like buys this beautiful red dress after like a long day, draping around New York City and then they go to Central Park, I think at night. I watched this episode relatively recently, but I have a terrible memory, so now I'm forgetting some of the details. Anyway, extremely romantic, beautiful, sexy, spontaneous night, and they end up hooking up at the end of the night and she stays over at his place. She discovers that he is actually addicted to heroin.

And the reason that he was so spontaneous, which hadn't formally really been part of who he was, is because he's struggling with addiction and it's changed him in a way that at first was like really fun until she realizes, oh wait, this is destroying his life.

[00:34:25] David: Yeah, that's really sad and it gives a kind of sad masculine twist on the trope of the manic pixie dream girl. Right? Like a manic, pixie dream man. It's not quite a term I ever thought I would use, but I, I do have a friend who quit alcohol, he's a friend with whom I have actually crashed a wedding.

[00:34:46] Ellie: Oh, that guy that you mentioned. Okay.

[00:34:49] David: well, like earlier I didn't mention anybody, but like he is one

[00:34:52] Ellie: You said you mentioned wedding crashing, so yeah, with a friend

[00:34:54] David: Yeah. And so like with him, I did crash a wedding, not too long ago, but then he quit alcohol because it was becoming a problem, and he reports that. A lot of people told him that when he quit alcohol, his spark died, that he was not fun anymore.

And I think this does point to that dark side of spontaneity where sometimes patterns of behavior that are indeed chaotic and unhealthy. Because they break the mold of expectation, get read as spontaneous and fun, and we are drawn to them because those people under those circumstances are the quote unquote life of the party.

And so it's important for us to think about what we qualify as spontaneous and on what grounds.

[00:35:44] Ellie: Yeah. And in fact, I think we mentioned alcohol use in our episode on fun a while back. I can't remember if it was in the main episode or in the bonus, but the way that a lot of habitual users of alcohol are considered to be like the fun ones, right? And a lot of people talk about how they like to drink so that they're more fun.

And I think we see here a connection between spontaneity and fun. A lot of times that feeling of spontaneous freedom, especially when it's with others, is the feeling of having fun and substances like alcohol drive us to more unplanned activity. And so I think then the question just becomes like, okay, so this feeling of freedom is worth valuing.

We also have to consider its trade-offs, like in the cases where this feeling is generated by a substance that is harmful, which in its own right is kind of interesting, right? 'cause we're talking about the feeling of spontaneity being caused by a substance.

[00:36:34] David: And I mean, this brings me back all the way to Aristotle and the idea that spontaneity is rare because the question becomes, well, can spontaneity be my habitual way of interacting with the world? Can I always be spontaneous or is that a contradiction in terms? And you know, not to put on blast my friends here in San Francisco, but I do have another friend who has this philosophy of like, I always wanna say yes to things like be a yes man.

[00:36:59] Ellie: Your wedding crash, your friend is doing well now, right?

[00:37:02] David: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Totally fine. This is a different friend who intentionally says yes to whatever's put in front of him, and it's because he believes in spontaneity and it fatigues him because he's always over committed in a way that actually takes the spontaneity out of spontaneity.

So far, we've talked about spontaneity in physics and in biology, scorpions included, and also in connection to our fundamental human freedom. A different philosophical dimension of spontaneity is its relationship to politics, and in particular in connection to social and political revolutions. How do revolutions come about?

Are they spontaneous activities that come out of nowhere, or are they the result of carefully orchestrated activity on the part of organizers? Can you engineer a revolution in the same way that you might plan a wedding? Or do you just have to wait around for a revolution to spontaneously emerge at the right time and place?

These questions are at the heart of Vladimir Lenin's 1902 Text, What is to be done?

[00:38:18] Ellie: Excited to talk about this today because I don't know this text or Lenin's work really well at all. Lenin, of course, was a central figure in the Bolshevik party, and he played a central role in the Russian revolution of 1917, but I didn't know that he writes explicitly about spontaneity.

[00:38:34] David: Yeah, he has a whole chapter on spontaneity in this book, and just to give some historical context for why he's thinking about spontaneity in 1902 in Russia. In the second half of the 19th century, there was growing discontent with the czar in Russia because for a number of reasons, the conditions of the people of the peasants and the working class were getting worse and worse, and there were a number of spontaneous uprisings that took place, uprising by workers, by peasants, sometimes even soldiers, suddenly disobeying commands from higher ranking officials and sort of like resisting authority.

And these uprisings suggested that maybe the conditions were ripe for a revolutionary transformation of society. And so Lenin is looking at these changing conditions and is asking, how do we transform society? Are these spontaneous like bursts of political activity that we're seeing here and there and everywhere?

Are they enough to wholly transform Russian society from the bottom up? Or do we need something else in order to canalize that energy and make sure that it's actually effective? And so that's why he's talking about this 'cause he's seeing spontaneity. He's just not sure how effective it's actually going to be.

[00:39:58] Ellie: Yeah, and I think this question feels highly relevant to the present as well, right? When we think about how quickly spontaneous movements tend to either dissipate on their own, for instance, maybe running out of energy or are squished by those in power, right? Even in the present, we have a lot of examples of political demonstrations that mobilize people in an unexpected and extremely exciting way, but that don't necessarily lead to lasting change in government or political economy.

It seems important to get to the bottom of this, like, how do we utilize spontaneous action for more established ends? And what do or what can spontaneous actions lead to on a collective level?

[00:40:43] David: Yeah, because the worry is. You can have spontaneous activity and then it's just a dead end and nothing happens. And in a sense that is Lenin's worry. He draws a distinction, now to get into the details of the text, between spontaneity, think about like a spontaneously occurring. Agitation in a factory where the workers are so fed up with their treatment at the hands of the factory owners that they literally just like walk out in anger and refuse to work anymore.

So for Lenin, that would be an example of spontaneity. Something that just like comes out of the blue, roughly, not out of the blue without causes 'cause there are clear material and causes, but nobody could have predicted that now rather than a week ago this would've happened.

And so he distinguishes spontaneity understood in that way from what he calls consciousness. And of course a term with significant Marxist associations and consciousness for him refers to having a more sophisticated understanding of the causes of your own oppression and letting that understanding guide your activities in the world.

[00:41:49] Ellie: It's the 1902 version of being woke.

[00:41:51] David: Yeah, exactly. Like consciousness raising, is a term from the 1970s or the workers attaining class consciousness. That's how Marx might put it. Now Lenin says that although spontaneity is the start of consciousness, because it is an outburst of political emotion, spontaneity by itself is not yet an organized struggle that is supported by a party that has revolutionaries fully devoted to it.

And you need that in order to really transform this ephemeral explosion of emotion into a much more sustainable movement that can have long lasting effect on society. And so when Lenin is looking at these like isolated uprisings, he's really worried that they are going to run out of steam.

And more specifically, he's worried that just spontaneity by itself without that Marxist self-awareness actually imposes some limits on the way in which the people involved in the spontaneous activities think about what they're doing. And the two things that he worries about the most are that on the one hand, it makes people parochial because, you know, like people will be worried about what's happening just to them and their friends or their coworkers. So like, you know, maybe the workers in a shoe factory will start advocating for better conditions for workers in shoe factories, but they won't be advocating for better conditions for soldiers or for people in a completely different sector of the economy.

On the other hand, he also worries that when you are caught up in the moment without that self-awareness, that you are going to become a reformist rather than a revolutionary.

[00:43:40] Ellie: Okay.

[00:43:40] David: And you can see, you know, you can see why that can happen because if your boss comes down and tells you, Hey, I'm going to double your salary, get back to work.

It might be that you're like, really happy about that. You know, I got what I want. But Lenin says, that might be true, but it won't change the essence of your condition as an exploited and oppressed worker.

[00:44:03] Ellie: I mean, I don't know if listeners are feeling the same way. I imagine many are, but there are so many bells going off in my head right now around the current political situation. And I think a general climate of feeling pessimistic about protests in the US in the face of rising fascism. And I think there are many reasons for why that might be.

And there are also, at least at the time of this recording, a little bit of signs for hope too. At the same time, I think this might be one way of diagnosing some of the malaise around the current American political situation, which might be that even as we're seeing a little bit of spontaneous protest and resistance, that is not always going alongside consciousness.

And that's an interesting way of putting it because I think. We usually talk about that as like it's not necessarily going alongside strong grassroots organizing. And so we have like these amazing organizers here in the US who try to kind of capture the attention of people whose attention span is the length of a TikTok video for longer than a given news cycle and have a real struggle with that.

And I think this idea of like, well, it's partly because of a lack of consciousness around all of this stuff that we might explain that. And I'm also reminded of a while back, I mentioned an interview that I'd heard, which I'm now like forgetting what it was. So sorry. But this guy you could find, I think it was maybe in our oligarchy episode, this guy was talking about how the left should really reclaim the idea of woke.

Like it is absurd. This idea has been co-opted by the right as something cringe, and I think a lot of leftists have started to see it that way too. Like, oh yeah, like woke is sort of used in scare quotes. It's like, no, if it actually refers to a consciousness of material conditions, then like that is the condition for possibility of genuine change.

[00:45:57] David: Yeah, I mean, I'm down to reclaim woke and the question, I think that Lenin is asking is how do we ensure that we get there? And it's a little bit of a chicken and egg problem, right? Like do you need the consciousness before you have the uprisings? Or once you have the uprisings, what do you do to get to the consciousness?

And I think one central element of this book that. It's really instructive for those of us on the left, especially in the United States, is his claim that what you need for that is institutional support. This is why so much about this book is about the importance of the party, what if there were a party in the US that was a truly revolutionary party that supported left wing movements, that supported protests, that supported workers when they go on strike.

Rather than, you know, like the Democratic party, that's just being lip service to centrist ideals at best. And aside from the party, he also talks a lot about what he calls the professional revolutionaries, people who are sort of full-time agitators who dedicate themselves to helping organize these events, who bring lunch to the workers, who know how to organize, how to make connections to local communities.

And so his answer is that what you need in order for these spontaneous outbursts of political emotion, like anger to become effective political movements is you need a kind of scaffold. And that scaffold is institutional support from people who know what they're doing. And you know, in 1902 in Russia, there were groups that were dedicating themselves to that.

And that's I think, what we're lacking in our political present. You know, who are the people whose job it would be to provide this kind of support? It's not entirely clear. And in connection to the concept of spontaneity, Lenin worries a lot about what he calls bowing to spontaneity, which is this idea that you should just wait for spontaneous uprisings to emerge because it's almost as if we fetishize spontaneity as it's more grassroots rather than top down organization.

Lenin is really drawing our attention to the fact that you do need centralized organization and support for leftist movements. They don't just happen on their own. They need that institutional scaffolding.

[00:48:20] Ellie: Okay, something is coming to mind here, which is my first experience of protest. I went to a pretty fancy all girls high school on the top of a hill in the suburbs of Los Angeles. And in addition to having a dining hall, we had a food truck that would come. It would, it had like enchiladas, tamales, like Mexican food, and it was known David, I don't know if you know this term, but in Southern California, hopefully this term doesn't get used anymore, but like these food trucks that would serve Mexican food used to be known as roach coaches.

[00:48:52] David: Oh my God.

[00:48:53] Ellie: I know it's like straight up, so racist. And so we had, everybody referred to it as the roach coach and it would come up and we all loved the food. I used to get like my Jarritos soda as well. And then one day it was determined that the food truck would no longer be allowed on our campus because it tainted the image of our school as like a fancy, bougie high school.

This is like the most racist shit ever. And so classist. Yeah. And so the students, we all decided to stay, just sit in on the last day that the food truck was gonna be on campus. And we didn't let the food truck leave because we all did a sit-in and we saw it as

[00:49:34] David: The poor people, they're like, what the hell? Let us go.

[00:49:36] Ellie: They're like, we actually just want to go home.

Like, unless you guys are gonna pay us extra for our time. And so yeah, I mean we loved like the, it was like a husband and wife duo that had the food truck and they like appreciated the expression of support. But I don't know if they actually really were like that bummed by losing our account and we all just kind of sat there and we were like, yes.

That we were following the spontaneous like political mobilization of the moment until our nun principal came outside and said, girls get back to class. And then we all just did, and then nothing came of it. The roach coach was never seen again. And it's just like, I feel like that a bunch of like privilege, mostly white high school girls trying to protect a food truck and then just being like, oh yeah, no, the person in power said that we had to go back to class. So be it.

Like that's what Lenin's talking about. There was no consciousness whatsoever there. That was like the worst of depoliticized spontaneity.

[00:50:32] David: Oh, okay. So I think that's a really good example. 'cause Lenon would say, what if we had sent a protest expert to you to let you know, Hey girls, the director of your school is gonna come and tell you to walk away. You need to choose a speaker who's gonna deliver your collective answer, but you need to have it prepared ahead of time.

So like that's what a professional revolutionary would do. They would also tell you, leave these poor people alone. Let them go home. You are keeping them captive. This is actually a kidnapping by a bunch of white girls in a fancy school.

[00:51:04] Ellie: That's a good point. And so spontaneity can give us a false sense of what it takes for activism to succeed. So protests that seem like they just happen as if like a bunch of people just take to the streets and magically walk in the same direction at the same time. Those are rare. And most protests actually involve a lot of planning behind the scenes, permits from the city, pamphlets and signs, safety measures, speakers to energize the base, somebody has to plan all this, and if the planning works, it might give the illusion of spontaneity, but it won't get off the ground without that planning.

[00:51:40] David: I think this is really my beef with the ideology of spontaneity, and I think I'm Leninist in this regard, that if you really think that spontaneity is the end all, be all of political life, it forces you into a depoliticized position of waiting, right? Where you're just like, Hey, no, I can't organize anything, I can't plan for anything. 'Cause that's not authentic.

And so I'm just waiting for something to happen around me without seeing myself as an agent of history, but rather just like as a passive spectator, that is hopefully going to be at the right time and at the right place. In those situations, the most I can do is pray that I get swept up by a revolutionary movement rather than taking concerted action to make sure that I am part of the causes that bring about that revolutionary movement.

And in thinking about what the party and the professional revolutionaries would do, there are two things, right? They provide material support for the revolution to make sure that the fires of revolutionary energy are still burning, you know, a week in, two weeks in, six months in, but they also take on the task of educating the next generation of party leaders and revolutionaries, right?

So when they go out and they give support to people who are on the ground doing this work, they educate them about political economy, about the nature of exploitation, about the antagonistic relationship between the haves and the have nots. And so that changing of people's interpretation of their political reality is part of their activism, and that's why Lenin says that leftists need to embark on what he calls a fierce struggle against spontaneity.

[00:53:37] Ellie: Wow.

[00:53:37] David: You know, ultimately what I like about his account is that he's not pitting, spontaneity and consciousness against one another. He has more of an embryonic model of their relationship. Where spontaneity is like the seed. It's like the beginning. You start becoming politically conscious when you, join a protest and you stop working because you feel oppressed.

But then you need to see the stages unfold with support. Without getting stopped at a stage of arrested development. And so the point here is that a spontaneous movement must lead in the end to people seeing the world and themselves through a new lens. And that's a Marxist lens, which obviously Lenin thinks is the true account of social reality.

[00:54:29] Ellie: We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please consider subscribing to our substack for extended ad free episodes, community chats, and additional overthink content.

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[00:54:50] Ellie: We'd like to thank our audio editor, Aaron Morgan, our production assistants Bayarmaa Bat-Erdene and Kristen Taylor, and Samuel PK Smith for the original music. And to our listeners, thanks so much for overthinking with us.