Episode 57 - Waiting

Transcript

David: 0:06

Hi, I'm David Peña-Guzmán

Ellie: 0:08

and I'm Ellie Anderson. Welcome to Overthink,

David: 0:11

the podcast where two friends

Ellie: 0:13

who are also professors

David: 0:15

put philosophy dialogue with the everyday.

Ellie: 0:18

Because big ideas are within everyone's reach.

David: 0:30

Ellie, you pitched this idea a while ago and voila, we don't have to wait anymore. It is happening. And I didn't know where to start when thinking about waiting. And so I decided to read a text that is probably the most referenced in the philosophy of waiting that I should have read a long time ago, but that I have never read, Waiting for Godot.

Ellie: 0:55

Oh wow. You didn't have to read that in high school?

David: 0:58

In Mexico? No.

Ellie: 0:59

Well, and you went to high school partly in the US.

David: 1:02

Yeah. Also, no

Ellie: 1:06

Okay. So I imagine that many of our listeners have seen, or at least heard of, or perhaps read the play by Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot. But since you were going in with fresh eyes and ears, tell us about this play. Give us a quick and dirty overview of it.

David: 1:23

Well, the overview in terms of my reactions is that I liked it, but the overview in terms of the plot,

Ellie: 1:29

Okay, thanks. Really, really subtle take on the play, David.

David: 1:35

Waiting for Godot? Yay. Other things? Maybe nay . So the benefit of this play is that it's really easy to describe because nothing happens. Um, in the play. Um, in fact, I read a critic who said it's the only play in the history of theater where nothing happens twice because it has two acts and you're waiting for something to happen and nothing happens in the first one and nothing happens in the second one. I thought it was a really cute phrase, "where nothing happens twice."

Ellie: 2:05

I, I see, I see. Okay. I didn't get it at first. Now, I get it.

David: 2:08

Yeah. So it's a story about these two characters Estragon and Vladimir, and they are two men who know each other and they are waiting for a character named Godot. And the author of the play, Beckett, specifies in the play that the scene itself is to include nothing more than a road, which is just like an open space and a tree. And so it's these two guys waiting by a tree on a road for a character named Godot. And what follows is just a dialogue that largely goes in circles. And that is very difficult to follow. It's a, it's an exercise in absurdist theater and you know, they try to pass the time and they encounter a couple of other characters at one point or another. But the important thing about the play is that you don't ever know anything about the background of these characters. You don't really learn anything about the kind of society that they live in. It's in a vacuum because the star of the play of course, is the act of waiting and they wait and wait for a character named Godot. And, uh, at some point a boy named Boy, that's it just like the most non-descript way of referring to a character, comes to tell them Godot says that they, that they won't come yet again. And so you get the sense that they've waited before and they will wait again.

Ellie: 3:33

Yeah, there's this kind of indefinite nature of the waiting that is also figured by the emptiness of the space around them. Right? You have a symbol of human society, which is the road, and then you have a symbol of nature, which is the tree, and that lends itself to many different interpretations. I, I also love in your description, you're just like, "They're waiting for this guy named Godot." And then you just say that like three times. I'm like David, there is at least dialogue in here. There is, there is some stuff that happens,

David: 4:05

Well, but the, but I think the best description of the play is the title. It's two guys waiting for Godot. And the reason that I say that is because yes, you're right.

Ellie: 4:14

Which is why you say that a fourth time.

David: 4:15

A fourth time. Yes, I think it's important to emphasize that they're waiting for Godot.

Ellie: 4:20

That's all you have to say about it.

David: 4:21

No, but the reason that I don't really talk that much about the dialogue is because one of the things that defines the dialogue in this place is that it just goes in circles. And as the reader, you get really frustrated with it. They lose track of their own dialogue at multiple times. They're like, what are we talking about again? I forgot what we were just saying. So the dialogue ends in abrupt ways. Sometimes it re begins and sometimes it just goes off the deep end where you don't really know what they're referring to and they don't know what they're referring to. So just to give you a concrete example, at some point, there's an extended dialogue between the two central characters Estragon and Vladimir where they don't even remember if they've ever met Godot. They're like, we think we've met him, And we think that he's real, but we don't know, but he's definitely coming because we have a meeting set up.

Ellie: 5:10

Yeah, yeah. And I remember, I mean, I, I I'll be honest. I don't have any particularly sophisticated philosophical takes on this play because I, like I said, haven't read it since college. But I remember being very interested in the idea that Godot is a standin for God, right. And that human existence happens in this period of time in which we are waiting for a savior. And I was like, oh, Godot, God.

David: 5:33

Yes because the, the French term would be based on an English pun.

Ellie: 5:39

I know, I know because even though Samuel Beckett was, uh, Anglophone, the, the play was originally written in French and then he translates it into English. And this play is known as a work of, as you said, David, absurdist theater. And the notion of an absurd work of art, at least as it comes out in the philosophy of Albert Camus is really that an absurd work of art shows us the absurdity of the human experience, which is defined by the gap between the human desire for meaning and the universe's inability or unwillingness to give us that meaning. So we long for objective meaning, but we do not receive it. And I think you really see that, of course, in this play, right.

David: 6:21

Yeah, I mean the indifference of the cosmos to our goals and aspirations and desires is what brings about that feeling of the absurd, both in Camus and I think also in Beckett. And the reason that I say that is because when I read the play, I really couldn't find a unifying thread, which bothered me. I, I wanted it to make sense. I wanted to find a connection that would unify all the disparate elements of the play. And, uh, I, I think that's one of the central features of absurdist theater, art, and philosophy. Which is that it's trying to put on display precisely what happens when that desire for unity breaks down And so what you get out of Waiting for Godot, definitely it's a commentary on the absence of God. That is a very common interpretation. But I also like to think about it just as a reflection on what it means to be in time, to wait. So independently of who you're waiting for, whether it's Godot or God, or some other character, just the act of being in time leads eventually to a breakdown of sense in human experience. And that breakdown of sense happens at the level of lived experience where you don't even remember what's happening. You don't know where you are, but also at the level of language, which again is why the dialogue itself, goes in circles and sometimes in tangents. And it's because the characters themselves are going in circles and in tangents, just because that's the nature of inhabiting time when the cosmos doesn't care about who you are or whether or not you exist.

Ellie: 7:58

Okay. Well, I can't wait to actually get somewhere rather than going in circles in our interpretation of waiting from a philosophical perspective today. So let's get into it.

David: 8:10

Today, we are talking about waiting.

Ellie: 8:13

How have the rise of smartphones and other conditions of modern life led to fewer and fewer experiences of waiting in everyday life?

David: 8:21

How do we experience temporality when we are waiting as opposed to when we are actively engaged in a task?

Ellie: 8:28

And what is the difference between active and passive modes of waiting? Lately, I've been thinking a lot about how the world of smartphones means I have fewer and fewer experiences of waiting. When I'm waiting in line at the airport, I'm not just waiting. I'm listening to a podcast. When I'm waiting for a train, right, I'm scrolling Instagram or TikTok. And if I'm supposed to meet up with a friend and they're running late, there's a good chance that they'll text me before I even leave the house to say, "Hey, I'm running behind. Maybe wait a bit and leave 10 minutes later." And then I can delay when I leave in order to coincide with their timing. It just feels like this novel experience that has totally transformed my everyday life since getting a smartphone, which for me happened when I was in college, I had a Blackberry. Then I got an iPhone in grad school.

David: 9:20

Yeah, I mean, as someone who uses their phone more than I care to admit, I get those notifications, it's like, you've, you've spent 25 hours a day um, and I, I think you are right. And I, I just really dislike being reminded of the effect that smartphones in particular have had on my experience of time, of how I inhabit it.

Ellie: 9:42

I, well, I can't believe you have those, those notifications still on David. You, I turned them off ages ago.

David: 9:48

Yeah, I'm a masochist.

Ellie: 9:49

They're, they're just such bad faith attempts from the smartphone companies. They're like, trust us. We really do want you to get off your phone, but then they don't really give a shit.

David: 9:56

Okay. But maybe I should do that.

Ellie: 9:59

Their algorithms are driving you to use the phone more. And then they're like, oh actually, sorry, here. You should spend less time. It's like putting the social problem on the personal.

David: 10:08

Well, and it's true because then I'm like, well, I've already sunk five hours today. Might as well just make it a full day. Like I end up putting like eight or nine.

Ellie: 10:15

Oh my God.

David: 10:17

You mentioned friends telling you that they're running late, for example. And I think waiting for a friend is a really good example of a form of waiting that has more or less disappeared in the age of smartphones. Even if I get to the restaurant well, before my friend does. They can still text me and tell me, Hey David, you know what, uh, the subway is delayed or there's a lot of traffic or worst case scenario. I can text them and be like, Hey, I'm waiting for you. Where are you at? And so the existence of the technology removes the uncertainty that I think is essential to genuine moments of waiting, of like, are they coming? Are they not? Did they forget? Did they die? I don't know. Like the, the notion that I cannot know is taken out.

Ellie: 11:08

Yeah, yeah, definitely. And I think there are two really interesting aspects to what you're describing the first is this removal of uncertainty. And I worry that as well. I worry that in modern life we've become much less comfortable with uncertainty. I think comfortable with uncertainty might be the title of a Pema Chödrön book, the amazing Buddhist thinker, but in any case love her. So there's this dangerous component of being less and less able to abide uncertainty that I think we see in every day, modern life, but at the same time, there's also something really cool about not having to live in that uncertainty when you're waiting for afriend. Like not having to wonder if they died, when really they just got stuck in traffic. My smartphone allows me to get a text from them, say, oh great, they're gonna be 20 minutes late. And then I can go about my next 20 minutes in a new way, because I'm not constantly caught up wondering where they are. So, so that's one thing, this kind of duality of the uncertainty as both a positive and a negative, if we wanna put it reductively. Then, the other thing in what you described that really strikes me is that a common result of waiting for someone is that you start to speculate about their intentions and experience. You imaginatively project, what might be happening to them. So, I know for instance that my friend Lily's work gets out at five. Maybe she got stuck a bit later because she's working on a project, right. It could also be about their motivations. Like maybe she's standing me up. Maybe she's been wanting to tell me for a while that she doesn't wanna be friends anymore. Lily, if you're listening to this, I don't actually think that you think that. But now we can usually have that immediate gratification of just verifying it in the moment. So we're less inclined to speculate about the lives and intentions of other people who we're waiting for now that not being sure why they're late has just kind of disappeared.

David: 13:00

I wanna play devil's advocate here because when I think about that uncertainty and the comfort of knowing that, okay, they're 20 minutes late and no big deal, part of what I like about the uncertainty of waiting is that, ideally, I'm not saying that this happens every time that somebody's late when they're meeting me at a restaurant, but sometimes it can lead you to reconsider your relationship to that person. And to really appreciate what you value in that relationship out of the feeling of uncertainty of like, did something really bad happen to them or not even going to that extreme, just like, I wonder where they are or what they're doing. And even in connection to the point that you make about projecting intentions onto other people, even though that's very dangerous, of course, there's a way in which it also reminds you of the difference of the other, right? The fact that this other person could have all these other motivations, all these other thoughts that you have not exhausted who they are in your relationship to them. And I think there's some value in that that is philosophical. Even though of course, there's a difference here between that philosophical value that I'm very poorly trying to articulate right now and maybe the way in which that gets translated into particular instances of waiting where I'm just like, ah, Lily is like a bad friend because she just chose another person to spend time with rather than me.

Ellie: 14:27

Yeah, no, but I, I wanna be clear there, David. I, I'm not placing a positive valuation on the absence of speculating about others' intentions that I think has come about based on this absence of waiting. I think that's, that's more, just a, a descriptive point, right? That we find ourselves less likely to speculate about the intentions of others while waiting for them now that we can get a text, having them tell us why they're late, right. And I think they're, at the very least, there's an ambivalence there where we're losing what you're describing, but then what we're also gaining is I can kind of get my time back because I know that that person is not going to appear within those 20 minutes. And so I can make a phone call or answer some emails, more likely as that you're just like scrolling Instagram, right. Instead of taking in the scenery. Cause that's actually maybe, maybe a better way to, to pass the time. Right. Is to accept, Hey, I have this 20 minutes. Why don't I just take in the scenery around me? Although who knows? It's it's kinda fun to scroll Instagram. Maybe. I don't wanna just be like, oh, well look, look around you. Anti-technology cause it can be cool.

David: 15:32

Have a deep contemplative moment.

Ellie: 15:34

Yeah.

David: 15:35

No, but I mean, even the phrase that you use is really intriguing to me that you gain your time back as if that time was somehow lost in the interim, on account of the uncertainty. Like, oh, I, I lost time, but now like knowledge buys you time. Very similar to the claim that knowledge gives you power in, in some respect.

Ellie: 15:55

Mmm.

David: 15:56

And here, I'm thinking about what do we do with the time that we quote unquote, "buy back or win back or gain" through the knowledge of what the other person is doing. And I think that in those cases, we actually tend to throw ourselves into meaningless, kind of mindless tasks rather than maybe inhabiting the moment and attending to our environment, even if there's no reason for it. So if my friend tells me I'm gonna be 20 minutes late, you know I am going to be on TikTok and, uh, I will eat up those 20 minutes in a semi mummified state.

Ellie: 16:36

Well, and I think this might take us back to the uncertainty point as well, which is that there is a particular proclivity of mind that happens when we are in states of uncertainty that can lead to quite a beautiful sense of creativity. So what I'm thinking about here is that waiting often enables mind wandering and mind wandering is often good. And one of the really interesting philosophers of waiting who I wanna return to later in the episode is Walter Benjamin. And Walter Benjamin writes about how it was while he was waiting at the Deux Magots cafe in Paris.

David: 17:13

Oh my god, a classic.

Ellie: 17:14

I know, I know su- such a goodie. And so he's waiting at this cafe and he has a brilliant idea while waiting. And this idea was to write a diagram of his life, which tragically he later lost. He also has a very tragic life story. He died

David: 17:28

while fleeing from the Nazis. Yeah. At the Spanish border, no?

Ellie: 17:32

Yeah, yeah. He killed himself because he thought that he was gonna be caught by the Nazis. But in any case, waiting, Benjamin says, can open up mental space for new ideas because it's this interstitial or maybe liminal space of mental idleness, which is a little similar to walking, which we talked about, you know, in, in our episode on walking.

David: 17:52

There, yeah, there definitely is a parallel here in the way in which we occupy time without an immediate goal, which happens in waiting and, and you're right it happens also in walking

Ellie: 18:04

mm-hmm

David: 18:05

At the same time, I mean, I'm going back to your claim that in our age of smartphones, we flee from waiting, I'm not sure that our fear of empty time, of lost time, is all that recent or all that specific to the age of smartphones as maybe you framed it at the, at the start of, of our discussion. And the reason I see this is because the philosopher, Harold Schweizer wrote a piece about the philosophy of waiting. There actually aren't that many pieces about this subject.

Ellie: 18:36

I found a few really good ones, but yeah, it's not a very common topic.

David: 18:39

I mean, yeah. If you compare it to like philosophy of anxiety or philosophy of boredom or any other emotion, it, it's really, or like waiting is not an emotion.

Ellie: 18:47

Mood. We, we call it a fundamental mood, perhaps.

David: 18:50

Funda- yeah. A mood of existence. So this philosopher wrote a piece, and he published it in 2005. So this is before, the rise of smartphones and he gives all kinds of examples of how we flee from the act of waiting. He talks about how we put magazines in dentist offices, how we put TVs in public spaces. He gives a really funny example of people carrying their cigarettes everywhere they go, which dates him a little bit, because I think now people smoke a lot less than maybe in the early two thousands, but you know, like carrying your cigarette as giving you an excuse to pass time, rather than wait abstractly. And according to him, the reason that we do all these things is basically because waiting produces worries about unproductivity, about being unproductive in time. And he has a really interesting genealogy of this problem, of our relationship to productivity and unproductivity in relation to time where he says that our anxiety about being productive, collectively, not individually, began with the emergence of Newtonian time. The idea that time can be broken into these tiny little interchangeable and measurable units that are all of the same size or the same magnitude.

Ellie: 20:09

Oh my gosh, throwback to our first ever Overthink episode on the commodification of time.

David: 20:16

Oh, yeah, you're right. We, we talk about this general idea there, and he says that once you start breaking down time into these Newtonian units, you start trying to maximally fill each unit of time with productive activity. So you feel that that pressure to produce.

Ellie: 20:36

Interesting. And actually I talked in our productivity episode about the way that I time track my work days. So I will say, oh, I just spent 30 minutes writing. And I spent five minutes on responding to emails and X, Y, Z. So, I guess from that perspective, it could be the case that if there's 10 minutes of time, that is not accounted for, then that seems like a waste, right? So is, is that the idea basically that it's with the rise of mechanical time through clocks and other methods of time tracking that we start experiencing the form of temporality that is waiting as a problem? Because it is empty?

David: 21:14

Yeah. We experience time in waiting as empty time, which doesn't make sense, right? There, time is not a container that can be filled or that can be empty. And so Schweizer makes the argument that before the development of hourly Newtonian time, people inhabited the moment. Following the demands of the local environment based on the logic of natural and seasonal time and even local conditions. So you experience time in a much more contextualized and time and place dependent way. But with capitalist and Newtonian time, suddenly anytime that is not filled by productive labor becomes time that we need to like speed through in order to get to time that we can fill with productivity, what he calls fillable time. And in his article, he says, look at the way in which we talk about waiting in everyday language. That's why we talk about waiting as killing time. Like, oh, I have 20 minutes to kill. And he says, that's why there is an entire industry for killing time, which is the entertainment industry, which is what gives you shitty Netflix shows and iPhones that just help us pass the time without really doing anything meaningful in that time.

Ellie: 22:33

Well, I think that really speaks to the profound discomfort that we have with waiting. So, maybe the smartphone scrolling is actually the culmination of this dream that you're saying precedes the proliferation of smartphones, this dream of getting rid of the sense of waiting, right. And I, I think some might say that this is the dream of getting rid of the fear of death since death is ultimately what we're waiting for.

David: 22:58

It's Godot.

Ellie: 23:00

I know death is Godot. I'm sure. I mean, yeah, obviously like a, another cliche interpretation, but I think at the same time that waiting at least many forms of waiting involves a sense of longing. So I think that the main remaining form of waiting in contemporary life, this form that we cannot overcome through the smartphones is waiting for somebody to text or call you when you've just started dating them.

David: 23:25

At least like what's, what's the rule 20 minutes a second text?

Ellie: 23:31

No, but I think a lot of people do have those rules, which I would consider quite arbitrary around when it's appropriate to respond to a call or text. But I think even more than that is the sense of waiting on the other end. Waiting for somebody to respond to you. Maybe we can call it romantic waiting, right? And romantic waiting in the sense of waiting for a text, say, isolates and individualizes you. And it does totally trigger that speculation about the intentions and experience of others that we mentioned disappearing through waiting for a friend and hearing that they're stuck in traffic. And I, I think this kind of waiting usually comes at the beginning of the relationship only when there is still this high level of uncertainty, because one of the characteristics of getting into a comfortable relationship is not feeling that you need to wait for one another. And also not feeling like if you are waiting for the other person to respond to you, that that means something about their feelings about you, right? It's like, oh no, they're probably just stuck at work. So maybe I'd go so far as to say that one of the characteristics of getting into a comfortable relationship is losing the feeling of waiting that you have early on, which can be a frustrating, but also thrilling experience.

David: 24:40

Or learning to wait without necessarily assuming that the future of the relationship hangs in the balance as it did at the beginning. So a long time ago, a friend of mine said something that really stood out to me. They said finding a lover is finding someone with whom you can just spend long periods of silence without feeling anxiety. And so just learning to wait together and to bring this back to waiting for Godot, you mentioned that like the interpretation of Godot as death or as God are, uh, relatively mainstream, I read that one of the interpretations of the play out there is precisely of a romance of an aging couple

Ellie: 25:21

Mm.

David: 25:21

that just waiting. Period. And that's because the only thing that we know about the characters in this Beckett play is that there are two people who care for each other and have spent a lot of time together. So it has been interpreted as a commentary on what it means to grow old with another person.

Ellie: 25:39

Waiting while having no sense of meaning and conversations that run in circles with no end.

David: 26:05

Harold Schweizer, whom I mentioned just a few moments ago, says in his work on waiting that waiting has not peaked the interest of philosophers, which is a little bit weird, given that all of us spend a lot of our time waiting, or, you know, at least we did in 2005 when he published his piece. And he says that the reason that philosophers have tended to ignore waiting as a philosophical category is because it's uncomfortably situated between two other categories that philosophers love to talk about and find a lot more intriguing. And those are boredom and desire. And waiting is just like the ugly sister, the fugly sibling of these other two, because it doesn't have the sexiness of desire, but it also doesn't have the gloomy melancholia of boredom. So waiting just seems super pedestrian in comparison to these other two.

Ellie: 27:04

That's odd to me because I would venture to say that waiting has bits of both desire and boredom, which makes it especially juicy because waiting obviously has elements of desire. Right, I mentioned this sense of longing. And even though we feel that sense of longing, especially in what I was calling romantic waiting, I think there is a more mild version of that, even while I'm waiting for the friend or waiting for a train right to wait is to wait for something. And it's as such an essentially outer directed mode of consciousness, it's specifically directed towards the future and towards an event or a meeting or whatever it might be in the future. And so it has that element of longing that I think is quite beautiful that we find in desire whether it's sexy or not. Right.

David: 27:51

Yeah.

Ellie: 27:53

And in this vein, there's a really amazing essay by the philosopher Imad Shouery from 1972, we were talking about how there's so little philosophy done on waiting, but like there's some really good stuff. And this, this was what I found was this really amazing essay by Shouery that offers a phenomenological analysis of waiting. And I totally recommend this essay. It's super interesting. And he writes there that waiting takes us outside of ourselves. Because while we're waiting, our time is no longer a space of possibility for us. Instead, we're just kind of biding our time while waiting for something to happen. And he ,gives us example of Gary. So, go with me here. I'm gonna talk to you about Gary.

David: 28:32

Yeah. Who, who's Gary?

Ellie: 28:36

Also a, a, you know, kind of old school name to choose here. Right? The 2005 example of the cigarettes and the 1972 example of Gary.

David: 28:44

Gary and Matilda.

Ellie: 28:46

No, it's it's Gary and Pat, it's Gary and Pat. Matilda is, Matilda's trendy, David, come on.

David: 28:52

Oh, I'm I'm out of the loop.

Ellie: 28:54

I mean, always remember when you said that turtlenecks might come back in, in the future when they've been in for like years in our Gen Z episode.

David: 29:01

Just wait.

Ellie: 29:04

Anyway, so Shouery gives an example of Gary who is waiting for a call from Pat. Pat has said that she will call between four and five o' clock. And while Gary's waiting for Pat's call, he picks up a book and he convinces himself that he's really reading during that time. He's not waiting, he's reading, but Shouery says this is false. Gary is primarily waiting for Pat during this time. And an example of this is that if Gary's friend comes in the room and says, Hey, Gary, you wanna go out for a drink? Gary will say, no, I'm waiting for a call. And for Shouery this shows that Gary's presence is conditioned or even determined by Pat's absence, which means that Gary is alienated from himself and time has become empty for him. According to Shouery consciousness stands still when we are waiting and Gary is temporarily suspending his own freedom.

David: 29:58

I don't know how I feel about this analysis. I get it that when you're waiting, you can't make other plans because you've already committed yourself. But I don't experience that as a form of alienation, especially because you said this is a phenomenological analysis, right? So I don't experience waiting as my own alienation from my own experience of time and from my own freedom. I largely experience it as trying to hold myself to a promise, to a mutual promise that two people have made, right. That we will do this, this plan. We will go for drinks. We will have a phone call as opposed to me being alienated from my time. But let's unpack a little bit more. So is the author saying that Gary, the person waiting, is in bad faith because he's reading while waiting and therefore not fully embracing the experience of waiting itself?

Ellie: 30:53

No, not quite. So he thinks that the act of waiting independently of whether you're reading or cleaning your fridge or listening a podcast, or just sitting there doing nothing is inherently alienating because in waiting, you give yourself over to time. So the consciousness of waiting is an alienated consciousness because self alienation means alienation from one's possibilities in time. You suspend your own freedom. So, you mentioned that, okay, this plan was created by both Gary and Pat. Gary agreed to wait for Pat's call at this time. And so he freely agreed to that. So maybe there's still his freedom there, but I think even if we were to grant that. We'd have to say on Shouery's analysis, that that was a previous iteration of Gary, a previous commitment that he made. And when he made that commitment, he committed to suspending his freedom between four and five. So even though he freely made that commitment during the period of 4:00 PM

to 5: 31:47

00 PM, he has suspended that freedom. And this is because he is waiting for Pat's call. And Shouery has some kind of colorful prose here. He calls waiting, literally quote "the death of time in consciousness." End quote.

David: 32:03

Wow. That. The death of time in consciousness, it seems like what he's talking about is actually the death of freedom in time, more so than the death of time in consciousness. Although if we're alienated from temporality itself, maybe that makes sense.

Ellie: 32:17

Well, yeah, because I think from a phenomenological perspective to experience time means to experience oneself as free within time. And we could, we could go down a whole Heidegger route there that we're not gonna go down, but I think that that would be a kind of implicit premise here.

David: 32:32

Yeah, but I mean, that, that raises a, a related but different concern for me, which is that if this author Shouery is correct in making the argument that in the act of waiting, we are essentially frozen or congealed in time. And that means that we don't have freedom. I can't imagine what it would mean to live a disalienated life. It seems like we would spend most of our lives in this state of temporal alienation because in one way or another, we are always already implicitly conscious of waiting for one thing or another, you know, we're always waiting for this recording to come to an end, for what's gonna happen tomorrow. Or even if we wanna just raise the existential temperature a little bit, we're implicitly conscious of the fact that we're waiting for death. We're all Vladimir and Estragon, you know, waiting for Godot.

Ellie: 33:27

Yeah, well, I wonder then whether we could distinguish between two forms of waiting. There are of course, many more forms than this, but I think maybe Shouery's analysis, as much as I like it, is lacking a distinction between waiting for things that you have done all of the legwork in order to assure will happen and waiting for those things that you have not done that legwork to make happen. So I think, for instance, when people vilify waiting, which is not quite what Shouery is doing, but I, I think is worth bringing into the mix here, this idea that you're just waiting around? What they mean by that is that you're waiting for something to happen that you have not put the work into assuring may happen. So for instance, if I am waiting around to become the next Rihanna , but I have never recorded a song or sent it out to people or whatever one needs to do in order to become the next Rihanna much of which is outside of one's control but some of which is within one's control, then I have totally alienated myself from my freedom. I am just like expecting something to happen. That I have not done the necessary work to make happen. However, Gary waiting for Pat's call has done that legwork. He and Pat have communicated.

He said, call me between four and 5: 34:48

00 PM. I will be waiting for you. And so maybe, I don't know if that makes sense to you, David, but like that might be one way of thinking about a form of waiting that is not alienating in the sense that you're describing.

David: 35:00

Yeah, but the problem is that Shouery says that that is an alienating

Ellie: 35:05

Oh yeah,

David: 35:06

instance. And so,

Ellie: 35:07

I'm, I'm differing from him there.

David: 35:08

Yes. Yeah, I know. And so it seems like I wanna differ from him in the sense that. I fear that he concedes too much over to the human desire for control either through technical mastery of the means that bring about a certain end or knowledge of the future. So I'm only not alienated, according to him, when I have been able to ensure that the future thing will happen on my own terms.

Ellie: 35:37

Well, he doesn't think that though. That that's a distinction I think he might benefit from having. He, he thinks that all waiting, even if I've done the legwork as I was putting it, I I've said the word legwork so many times in the past three minutes, but you get the idea just what that's just, what's coming to mind here.

David: 35:51

Yeah. And so like your example of Rihanna, right? Like that's a very extreme one, but in general, I think that we're always waiting for things that we have no sovereignty over, even little things. And so it still leaves open this question of, can I ever not be alienated according to Shouery and, and I'm not sure that it seems like, like I can overcome my alienation.

Ellie: 36:16

Yeah, no. In, in waiting consciousness, he doesn't think that you can, he thinks that the goal is actually to overcome waiting, which means radicalizing one's choice in any given situation of waiting. So may, maybe one way we think about this is Gary continually renewing his commitment to wait for Pat's call. And in so doing overcoming waiting, which sounds very difficult to sustain, especially when you apply it to something like waiting for death. An example that you mentioned, David, are we to constantly be thinking about our own deaths? Unfortunately, we've always already done the legwork of assuring that death will happen by virtue of being finite.

David: 36:56

Of being alive there is no better guarantee of death than life. Uh no, but I mean, even with the case of trying to radicalize our freedom while waiting to truly radicalize my freedom, when I'm waiting for you to give me a call means that I am free to no longer wait for the call from you. And that means I can start doing other things. And it seems like I would have to do that in order for me to really prove that I am free. Right. Like, The best proof of freedom is in the pudding. You have to actually do the thing. And so it means that you never can wait, like I make plans for you. And then I immediately start doing other things that prevent those plans from coming to fruition, which okay, that's, that's a practical consideration. The philosophical consideration that is still up in the air for me is my inkling that all consciousness is waiting consciousness, even if only on an existential level of consciously waiting for death. So there is never a moment in which there is no waiting.

Ellie: 38:00

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David: 38:26

One question that I'm having is whether waiting is essentially a passive state or whether there can be an active form of waiting. And it sounds like Shouery associates that with a passive state, that's fine. But there are other thinkers of waiting like the philosopher Gabriel Marcel, who differentiate between two forms of waiting. Marcel uses the term inert rather than passive and active. And he says in inert waiting, we have very little control over the thing that we're waiting for. And we experience the act of waiting as something that we have to endure basically. So like, I just have to sit through this because I can't control the variables. And the problem with this waiting is that it can lead to frustration and despair very easily. Meanwhile, active waiting is where we can exercise some level of agency and embrace the act of waiting as we are doing it. And Marcel says that kind of active waiting can be the foundation, not just for hope, but even faith.

Ellie: 39:36

Oh, hell yes. This sounds like my time to talk about Walter Benjamin whom I mentioned I wanted to bring back in this episode and interestingly, I mean Marcel and Benjamin are both in different ways, somewhat religious thinkers of waiting. I mentioned the example of waiting in a cafe and Benjamin deciding to write this diagram of his life. That's not so much a religious example of waiting, but he does have other writings on waiting that I think resonate a lot with this description of Marcel that you're giving, David, and this distinction between inert waiting and active waiting. Benjamin looks to the Jewish tradition to offer a different vision of waiting than the common one that associates waiting with merely a passive vision of the future or what you've just called inert waiting. And he develops the notion of messianic time in his very influential text On the Concept of History, which is a form of waiting for the future that is actively engaged in the present. So it might seem like waiting for the Messiah is something that happens in the far, distant future. And you're just kind of passively waiting around. But that's not at all what is happening in the Jewish tradition of messianic time. . He notes that the Torah prohibits the Jewish people from investigating the future. So this led to a resisting of the impulse to project into the future constantly, which you see in most other cultures, you see it perhaps today, most of all on Wall Street where arguably the entire stock market is based on projections of the future viability of a country or of a company. I said, country, yeesh.

David: 41:08

Same thing at this point.

Ellie: 41:10

I know. Um, so he says, instead the Torah instructs the Jewish people in remembrance in looking back at the past, but this doesn't mean that for them, the future is a mere empty expanse. Instead, what happens is that the prohibition into speculating about the future totally reorients engagement to the present. And he says that because the Jewish people were encouraged not to speculate about when the Messiah would come. Quote, "every second of time was the straight gate through which the Messiah might enter" end quote. So instead of being like, oh my friend's gonna come in 20 minutes, the Messiah's gonna come in a thousand years, the uncertainty involved in not trying to predict the future means that every moment is potentially the site of the Messiah's entry. So this is a form of messianic waiting that imbues the present with a constant sense of possibility, which is very different, right? From the more passive view that we get in Shourey.

David: 42:11

And you see that sometimes in social media posts, uh, that say things like, you know, the next person that you see on the street struggling could have been Jesus or could be Jesus, right? With the, with the coming of Jesus, just as a way of highlighting the fact that the future is not something that is forever removed, but is something that is already in some way, germinating in the present. And it, it might, um, it might take root any second. Now I like the notion of messianic time, as much as you do, Ellie, but as exciting as that concept is, it still seems to me rooted in the very figure of a Messiah or the notion of a savior, right. We're waiting in the present for the emergence into our time of somebody from another time, whoever that figure might be. So it is a kind of waiting that can muddy human experience to some degree by making us not only look to the future, but look to the future for the sake of the arrival of a particular concrete figure of whom we already have a certain preconception, And this is a worry expressed by Jacques, who offers a reading of Benjamin

Ellie: 43:30

Mm-hmm mm-hmm

David: 43:31

on messianic time and argues that we should move in the direction of what he calls messianicity without messianism, which is a quintessentially, uh, deconstructive formulation. And in short, it means waiting for an event without needing to know ahead of time what that event is or what it looks like. So it's, it's actively waiting for a placeholder that doesn't have any defining characteristics that might limit the event itself. So we need to be open to the possibility of being surprised by that, which is to arrive. But the really interesting thing about this for Derrida is that this kind of waiting also means taking responsibility for the present. And I wanna read a quote here. He says "the responsibilities that are assigned to us by this messianic structure are responsibilities for the here and now. The Messiah is not some future present. It is imminent. And it is this imminence that I am describing under the name of messianic structure."

Ellie: 44:41

Yeah, Derrida is definitely part of the reason that Benjamin's notion of messianic time has gotten as much uptake as it has in contemporary philosophy, but you're right that he thinks that we need to sort of remove the religious elements of it in order to produce a more ethical sense of responsibility. I, I think for both Derrida and Benjamin though, and, and this is why Benjamin inspires Derrida on this point, the notion of messianic time involves a kind of active waiting, or at least a waiting that has liberatory potential. But I think waiting in everyday parlance often gets associated with passivity because it's what we do when we fail to act or what we do when we can't act.

David: 45:26

Yeah, and I think that's what makes the concept of messianic time so exciting, that there is something proactive about it and the faith that it engenders and the temporality it produces. Nonetheless, I do think we need to think more about other forms or models of active waiting that are not necessarily rooted in this religious notion of Messianism. So, how can we think about active, productive, hope generating forms of waiting that don't hinge on that. And a book that I found very useful for thinking about this distinction between and active forms of waiting is a book called Ethnographies of

Waiting: 46:06

Doubt, Hope and Uncertainty by Manpreet Janeja and Andreas Bandak, who are two cultural anthropologists who look at concrete cases of waiting. And they do reference Gabriel Marcel's distinction between inert and active waiting in order to argue that there is a difference between what they call the politics and the poetics of waiting. And what they mean by that is basically that the politics of waiting is using waiting as a strategy to exercise biopolitical control over certain populations. Uh, so you can think here about, for example, prisoners who are by definition made to wait under conditions of captivity. Think about asylum seekers who are put in shanty towns in the borders of cities waiting for some bureaucratic process to kick in. Think about refugees. And so these are cases in which waiting is enforced on a population and it can once again, bring out a sense of despair. Because you just have no control over what's happening to you. But, they say, we need to move away from this notion that the waiter, the person who waits, is always a sufferer in the way in which these particular examples might lead us to believe because not all forms of waiting are like that. There are cases, according to them, where people can actively choose waiting as a life strategy or as a mode of existence. And when they do, they can inhabit the time of waiting in such a way that it brings out those new possibilities and those new affordances that someone like Derrida is also looking to. Although they are a social scientist, the authors actually give a literary meta example that really stood out for me. And that is Penelope from the Odyssey. as you might remember from, uh, reading the Odyssey, when Odysseus leaves to go on his epic adventure, his wife Penelope stays behind and as time goes by, she starts getting harassed by a bunch of suitors who are after her because they wanna take over the palace basically.

Ellie: 48:23

Classic.

David: 48:24

And Penelope outsmarts the suitors by telling them that she has to do this thing. She has to finish weaving a shroud and it's because Odysseus' father is moribund and part of tradition is that she has to weave this shroud. She tells this whole lie, like I really have to do this. And then she promises. That she's gonna choose one of the suitors to marry once she finishes that project.

Ellie: 48:53

Well, and the implication is they all think Odysseus has died, right. So, so that's also key here.

David: 48:57

Yes, because she has been waiting for a long time. And what happens is that Penelope spends her days weaving this shroud and the suitors think that she's making progress, but secretly at night, Penelope goes and unravels the shroud. And so in this way, she buys herself time and actively maintains herself in a position of waiting for Odysseus, who of course ultimately returns and all ends well. I, I, I mean, not for the suitors who are brutally murdered

Ellie: 49:32

They get massacred.

David: 49:33

A furious Odysseus. But in general, they end well for Penelope and for Odysseus.

Ellie: 49:39

Well, and if we're taking this as an example, David, as you said of the poetics of waiting, according to these thinkers, then maybe this leads us to think about how it's in the poetics of waiting that we discover ways of waiting that can be liberating. And I, I think for me, that takes me back to this idea of mind wandering. Where the poetic element of waiting is this openness that you might have to different experience. It could also perhaps be found in, in speculating on the intentions of others. Right. And that's very different from this politics of waiting where somebody is in a liminal state of exception in a shanty town.

David: 50:16

Yeah. And in fact, this is how I read Waiting for Godot as a poetics of waiting. And as you noted, Ellie, the play has been interpreted by a lot of people as absurdist as showing that life is empty of meaning. But I actually walked away from reading it with a slightly different and maybe more upbeat interpretation about what's happening in the play. And the reason is that I ask myself what kind of waiting is happening here? Independently of who they're waiting for and whether or not the waiting actually comes to fruition. And I came to the conclusion that the two characters Estragon and Vladimir are not just waiting. But they are waiting together. And so there is that kind of poetic beauty to being in the company of others, even again, in a world that is largely indifferent to human existence. So, sure Godot is not coming and Godot might not even exist. Sure, they've been waiting forever. Sure. The landscape is super bleak, but at least they are in each other's company and that togetherness allows them to produce meaning and to produce joy. And it allows them to engage in dialogue, right? Like they talk to one another, they constantly make jokes. Yes, at some points they bicker and fight, but you get the sense that, that they're friends and that they care for one another. And they have a deep affection for one another owing precisely to the fact that they, they're in this pickle together.

Ellie: 51:56

It reminds me of Socrates's statement as he's waiting for death, that what could be better than passing the time while waiting for death than telling each other's stories.

David: 52:10

Hope enjoyed today's episode. Please rate and review us on Apple Spotify, or wherever you to your podcasts.

Ellie: 52:18

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David: 52:25

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Ellie: 52:35

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