Artem, guest extraordinaire, is back. He made us read Martin Heidegger’s essay The Age of the World Picture, and in this episode he achieves the impossible. Under his patient tutelage what had previously been an impenetrable, fastidious German hallucination became clear, meaningful, even actionable

Heidegger’s work does not stand alone - he’s building on millennia of philosophical tradition, most recently Hume, Kant, Nietzsche and Hegel, and on top of that he is reacting to his mentor Husserl. The Age of the World Picture, however, can be read independently of all that. There’s very little phenomenology, the subjective viewpoint and intentionality are not mentioned, and instead we get a straightforward discussion of what modern thinking is, how it differs from the ancients and medievals, the institution features of modern science, and how all this relates to our view of what is in the world and how we interact with it.

We did, however, want to understand a bit of what phenomenology is. A bit of intellectual context helps. Phenomenologists want us to stop thinking of senses as passive receivers. Instead our senses are reaching out into the world and constructing phenomena, applying pre-existing structures (redness, squareness) to help us make sense of what’s there. Our brains are modelling the world and checking that model against the input of the senses. We come to the world with a bunch of assumptions, and think about the world through these assumptions.

The Age of the World Picture describes how the modern way of thinking about the world is just one bunch of assumptions, but crucially a bunch of assumptions that is compatible with the notion that there are other other bunches of assumptions that could be used instead. This idea that there can be different worldviews, that your own view is just one and it is different from the views enjoyed by the Greeks and the medievals, is a key aspect of the modern world view. We are even able to use different ways of thinking about the world, different ground plans, to do different things. The way you approach a physics problem, the ground plan you apply to understand it, is completely different to the way you approach a biological problem, not to mention a historical problem. We shift how we think about the world depending on context, and as a result we’re fragmented, splintered, alienated from having to constantly context switch. We become relativist, and try to reintroduce normativity by creating “values” as objects in themselves that can give us some moral grounding. But as Heidegger puts it, “nobody dies for mere values”. We need to find a new way of thinking about the world if we are to move forwards.

Is opera the pinnacle of high culture, or a boring anachronism?

One of us has enjoyed some excellent recent operas at Covent Garden, the other’s exposure to the artform was a single regrettable unstaged Wagner playthrough at the Albert Hall. Both of us have had a couple of drinks.

The problem is that opera is not really an English artform - the Royal Opera House was better known for pantomime until surprisingly recently, and pantomime is an English artform, and it’s fun, and it taps into a deep lake of tradition, and you can bring in popcorn and it’s participatory. Opera is a stuffy German and Italian tradition, and English opera lovers tend to act in a very German or Italian way, like shouting bravo after a well-sung aria, and that’s pretty embarrassing.

It’s also a relic of a time before electronics. If you want a spectacle, watch Dune in the IMAX. If you want a live spectacle, go to a UFC event or a Sleep Token gig. It’s telling that all the good contemporary composers work in film now - opera is a museum piece watched by old people and only kept alive by enormous state subsidy.

But high culture is important. A lot of excellence has to come together at the same place and time to deliver an opera performance - the best singers and dancers in the world, above the best orchestra and conductor in the world, supported by the best lighting designer, set designer and director in the world, playing music by one of the best composers of all time, and all these people are trying to push the boundaries and create something that transcends the everyday. You are drowning in IRL excellence in a way that is hard to experience in any other context, and if you commit to it it can take you places low culture cannot.

Yes it’s inaccessible, unashamedly so. Excellence is hard to appreciate without a great deal of relevant knowledge and experience, and it takes time and effort to build this. But there’s real virtue in cultivating the ability to be able to recognise excellence when you see it, and then to enjoy it.

So if only for this reason, we’d say opera is worth a try - perhaps with two glasses of wine beforehand.

Our co-host has experienced the first stirrings of a desire to become a bird watcher. How did this happen?

He looked out of the window, and saw what he now knows to be pied wagtails. They were flitting around the bins, darting around, wagging their tails, and he thought they were very charming and fascinating and lovely. They were quick, their quickness was mesmeric. He looked them up, found that they were wagtails, and he found this whole experience very satisfying. Now, whenever he has a lazy morning with nothing else on, he’ll go out into the garden with a cup of coffee, and sit there watching (and identifying) the birds.

He’s at the start of a long journey, but is wary about what this says about him. We can reassure him with tales of Victorian excellence, or Jim Corbett or Gerald Durrell, or Stephen Maturin of Master and Commander fame. But still, what’s going on here? There’s certainly no practical application of this (as there may have been a century ago).

There’s an innate satisfaction in being able to classify the world around us (a common British affliction) and to be able to name things. It’s a good excuse to get outside and go on a walk - or even to sit outside in silence without your phone, which is unquestionably healthy but difficult to give yourself permission to do. And, actually, humans are predators and we rarely get the opportunity to exhibit the hunting behaviour that is innate to us all, if suppressed. Bird watching gives us a harmless outlet for our ancient instincts.

But above all, they are hypnotic, entrancing, bewitching. There’s a sense of the magical about birds. They live in a world apart from ours, navigating the world in a different way to us, free in their flight, brightly colourful. It’s no surprise that birds are often used as omens and metaphors in literature - especially metaphors of thought and the mind.