Conversations With Myself (and sometimes other people)
Navigating the crises of American millennial life through inner dialogue, character bits, mediocre impressions, the occasional sit down conversation with a real person, and other questionable acts of "creative expression".
Conversations With Myself (and sometimes other people)
What Is A Chair, Really?
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Dr. Jordan Peterson joins the show to answer my question with a question.
Conversations with myself. Sometimes other people. Conversations with myself. Conversations with myself. Host a backet of connections. Come on and stay out. Conversations with myself. Sometimes other people do.
SPEAKER_00Doctor Jordan Peterson, it's an honor to have you on my show today. I know you only have a couple of minutes as you're a very busy man and probably have some lectures to get to. So I'll just get right into my question. I know you travel a lot and stay in hotels all around the world. Can you tell me what you think the purpose of the chair in the corner of each hotel room is? You know, the one that's always facing the bed. There's a theory for why that is, but would like to know what you think about it. The floor is yours. Well What is a chair? Really? Now look. People think they understand what a chair is. They say well it's just a chair No, it's not just a chair. That's exactly the kind of careless thinking that gets you into trouble historically psychologically existentially because a chair if you really break it down, is it merely an object? It's a structure, a voluntary stability in a chaotic universe. And you might say, Well, that's a bit much. It's got four legs and you sit on it. But that's already an assumption. Why four? Why not three? Why not none? You see, embedded in the idea of chairness, and I don't use that term lightly is the presupposition of balance of orientation of uprightness and uprightness this is crucial. It's not merely physical it's moral because to sit upright in a chair is to adopt a posture of attention. And attention is the precondition for responsibility. So when you sit casually, slouched, indifferent, you're not merely relaxing. You are in a very real sense enacting a microcosm of civilizational decline. Now people laugh at that. They say, well, surely sitting poorly can bring about the collapse of society, but that's because they don't understand the relationship between the small and the large. Because everything that is large is composed of things that are small. That's not a metaphor. That's literally how reality is structured. So the chair becomes a site of negotiation between chaos, represented by the ground, which is formless, unstructured, dangerous, and order represented by the elevation, the boundary, the delineation of space. And when you sit in a chair properly, properly, you are participating in that eternal negotiation. You are saying I will not collapse into chaos. I will structure myself. And that's no small thing. Because if you can't even sit in a chair properly, properly, what makes you think you can order your life? That's actually a very good question in response to my question. Um and I'm gonna be pondering this for some time to come now. Well, Dr. Peterson, thank you so much for uh joining our show uh virtually today uh for uh a couple of minutes. Hopefully we'll have you back on some other time. Well, that depends on what you mean by time. Because if it's a couple of minutes, well then that you break that down, and that's like 120 seconds. And if you break that down, yes, uh I yeah, Ms. Dr. Peterson. Sorry not to cut you off, but um yeah, I I I got it. I think I got it. Oh well, okay. Yeah, it was great to be on the show. Thanks, Caleb. Goodbye. Goodbye, Dr. Peterson. Thanks, everyone.