Mind & Desire

About Mind & Desire

This podcast takes insights, arguments, distinctions, and practices from complex philosophical texts and thinkers and makes them accessible for anyone who wants to learn. It also provides advice about how to effectively study philosophy and apply it to your own life gregorybsadler.substack.com (https://gregorybsadler.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast)

Publisher

Gregory B. Sadler

Category

education · society & culture

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

6 Apr 2024

Latest episode

26 Aug 2026

Latest episodes

59 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   26 Aug 2026

   Episode 59: What Is Kafkaesque In Kafka’s The Trial?

   Earlier today, in one of the sites that I frequent pretty often, I saw something posted about Kafka that I thought wasn’t quite right. Although it was clearly reflective of what the author had to say about it, but it also struck me as something that’s a little bit either naive or hackneyed, and I wanted to say a bit more about my own response—or rather think a bit more about it. I’m intending down the line to do a bit of writing about it, so I thought I would hash out the ideas here. So, you might be saying, “All right, what did this person say?” It has to do with his novel, The Trial, which I assume that many of you are familiar with. If you’re not, there’s a guy whose name is simply Joseph K., and he finds himself one day accused of a crime, and he spends nearly all of the novel trying to figure out what he’s actually guilty of and how to prove that he’s not actually guilty. And he tries all sorts of different remedies, you might say: he engages a lawyer, he tries bribing people, he even at one point meets, towards the end, with the prison chaplain. And nothing works. And at the very end of the novel, he is killed, and he says, “like a dog.” So a lot of people have taken this as sort of a symbol for totalitarian regimes, or guilt, or whatever we want to make of it. And this person wrote, “The terrifying thing about Kafka’s The Trial isn’t being found guilty; it’s never finding out what you’re guilty of.” So notice that they’re saying being found guilty: not really that big of a problem. It’s bad, but it’s not terrifying. But not finding out what you’re guilty of while the sentence is passed on you, that’s the terrifying thing. I think “terrifying” is probably a bit of an overreaction. It’s being dramatic for the sake of being dramatic, probably to get eyeballs, or responses, or clicks, or whatever. Maybe the person really feels that’s the right term, but I think there’s probably a lot of other ones that are more apt. And I leave it up to you to think about what you would say about that. But there’s definitely something unsettling, something deeply wrong about being found guilty without knowing what your crime is. But I don’t think that’s actually the worst thing in the novel. And I myself responded with the following: “Got to say, for me, neither of those are it. It’s instead making all those seemingly right, but ultimately fruitless efforts to get things back on track, only to find out they might have worked if you just knew and did something prior to them that, of course, you didn’t know.” So to me, that’s really the essence of The Trial. And you could even say this extends to some of Kafka’s other short stories, or to his other big novel, The Castle, where you try something, and it’s unsuccessful. And why did you try it? It was the thing that was supposed to fix things, get things on track, remedy the problem. But of course, it fails, and it fails because the causality is more complicated than you realized, because you didn’t have enough information. And if you had just asked this person over here, they could have given you the right information, but in fact, you didn’t. But you also didn’t know that you should ask that person. Or maybe on some level you did, but you didn’t pay attention to it, or something was hidden, some factor in it. So there’s always like a rational explanation, but you’re outside of that sphere of rationality, and so things turn out wrong, even though they’re going to keep on going on. Now, should we call that horror or terror, or anything quite so extreme? Maybe not. Maybe that’s the wrong term for it. It’s certainly something bad in the stories, and it’s bad when we encounter it in life. So you might think perhaps about here in the United States dealing with medical insurance, where they’re denying your claim and telling you that because of a hospital stay, you owe tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars, and it might get worked out properly, but it might not. This is a big problem here in the United States. And the system is, so to speak, rigged against you, and you have to jump through all these hoops, and they’ll say, “Well, you should have done this back then,” and you’ll say, “Well, but I did the reasonable thing at the time,” and they’ll say, “Well, from your perspective, it looks like the reasonable thing, but that’s not the way the system works.” And we could come up with all sorts of other examples of this, whether it’s education, or personal life, or the corporate world—pick whatever you like, we could uncover all sorts of interesting analogies to this. That, to me, is really the heart of the issue in Kafka’s stories. That is what makes them “Kafkaesque.” It’s not just being guilty of something and not knowing precisely what you’re guilty of, but just knowing the fact that you are guilty—that’s not enough to make it Kafkaesque. It’s not simply that there’s a bureaucracy that stands in the way and doesn’t seem to make sense; it’s rather this much more organized and even on some level rational structure, along with a causality that is partly natural and partly social, that you gain at best limited and all-too-late insights into. So you can’t make the causality work for you, even though you were led to believe that you could. To me, that’s sort of the essence of the “Kafkaesque” when people are invoking it. Now, you could say, “Well, who made you the arbiter of that?” I’m not saying that I am the decider, and I’m even willing to grant that many people in the common use of Kafkaesque probably mean something much more superficial, but I do think that this should be a contender for the real problematic lying in Kafka’s works. Now, I do want to say something else before I wrap up about an experience that I had the first time reading The Trial way back in college. And I remember exactly where I was: I was in the suite that I was living in, in the common space, sitting on the couch with the fluorescent light shining down from above, reading through the library edition of the novel that was bound and clearly had seen quite a bit of use. And I was struck by the scene in which Joseph K. goes to the law court and finds out that it is in the attic of a building. So he goes up the stairs and he goes to the law court—and I forget exactly who he learns this from—but it turns out that the law court exists as an institution diffused through all of these upper levels of the buildings within the city that he lives in. So it’s this vast, diffuse network of the mechanics of the legal apparatus at work, unsuspected, above all of us in that narrative universe, all the time. To me, that was a gut punch. That was horror—or to use the other person’s word, terror. And that, to me, is a much better candidate than just finding out that you’re guilty and not knowing what you’re guilty of, in part because it doesn’t just have to do with the individual; it is cosmological, you might say. You’re realizing something about the nature of the universe, or at least the human part of it that we inhabit, that makes it threatening and alien to you at the same time. So, I don’t have any big philosophical message or theory here to impart other than what I’ve already said, but I thought it could be of interest to some of you if you’ve thought at all about what the Kafkaesque really means, or about this particular novel, The Trial, or how Kafka sets up his stories. And like I said, I’m trying to work my own thoughts out about this. Perhaps I’ll do some writing about it down the line that you can see and engage with. But if you have thoughts about this, you can go ahead and leave them as comments here, and that might actually promote a little bit of thinking on my part. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe (https://gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

2. 

   10 Aug 2026

   Episode 58 - Michel De Montaigne's Reasons For Not Repenting

   I recently had the occasion to reread (because I was going to produce videos on it) an essay among the many by Michel de Montaigne. And it’s from kind of late in his work. It’s called “On Repentance” or “On Repenting,” both of which are decent translations of Du Repentir. I was struck by his reasoning, which he’s exposing to himself, but also to us, his readers, about why it is that he typically doesn’t feel this affect of repentance. And before we jump into his reasons (which I find really interesting): so what is it to repent? It’s to feel like not only did you do something wrong in some sort of objective sense, like you didn’t choose the best solution to a problem, or you made a mistake, or you actually chose to do something that you knew was unjust or wrong in some other sense. It’s to feel bad about it as well. That’s an integral component. And we have it showing up in both philosophical and religious literature very early on. In Greek, it is metanoia, which has this sense of taking your mind or your heart and changing it or turning it. So you realize you had something wrong. It might have seemed right to you at the time, or you might have given in to it, and now you don’t feel or think the same way as you did about something previously. And it bothers you. It makes you feel like you not only did the wrong thing, but maybe for the wrong reasons, or it’s a sign of flaws in your character, or it was a spot that becomes a stain, however you want to frame it. So Montaigne is saying, “Listen, I don’t really experience that much.” And you could say, “Well, he must think he’s a really great guy. I mean, who could possibly not have anything to feel bad about? Only somebody who, either rightly or wrongly, thinks of themselves as not having made mistakes or being better than the average lot, being better than the rest of us.” And Montaigne doesn’t do that at all. He actually tells us a couple really interesting things. One of them is that he actually does have a desire or wish that he could be much better than he is, but he doesn’t think that that’s actually repentance. And I think for a lot of people that might bring about repentance. They think, “Oh, I could be better than I am in a sort of theoretical or hypothetical sense. So therefore, I have a duty to be better than I am”. And: “Oh, I’ve let that duty down, and I should have made some other choices or some other commitments. Then I wouldn’t be the schlub that I currently am.” Montaigne says, “Yeah, this isn’t repentance.” It would be just as silly for me to repent of it as it would be for me to grieve because I’m not an angel or even a Cato, right? He uses this example. He writes a whole essay about Cato the Younger, the possibly Stoic sage, certainly a culture hero for them, somebody Montaigne would have been very familiar with. So to compare himself with Cato is to say, “Yeah, that guy’s really great. I’m not. I’m who I am. Maybe God could change me to make me be like Cato, but lacking some miracle like that, I’m going to be what I am.” And I can register the distance between myself and Cato, and I can register the fact that Cato is a much better person than I am, and yet not have to repent about it. So that’s one interesting aspect. He also talks about, and he devotes a good bit of discussion to this, that he does acknowledge there are a number of mistakes that he’s made in the past, as well as plenty of successes. Some of those successes he was fortunate rather than say prudent, and there were plenty of cases where he made the best decision possible at the time and things still went haywire. They didn’t pan out. And why is that? Well, because things are complicated. The world is a concatenation of many different causes that we don’t fully understand. We don’t even really understand ourselves all that adequately. You know: why do we have the motivations that we do? Why do we sometimes self-sabotage or get in our own way or pick the wrong course? Well, these things are tricky. So the best that we can do is make a reasonably well-informed, decently organized, and in good-willed decision when we’re faced with things. Sometimes we have the leisure to ponder these matters for a while; sometimes we have to make decisions rather quickly. Montaigne says there’s plenty of things that I got wrong, I just don’t actually repent them. I may have a few regrets here and there, but regrets are not the same thing as repentance. The other thing that he says that I found particularly striking in this was that he’s now an old man, and he’s recounting his more libertine days when he was easily turned by a pretty head or body, and pursued sexual pleasure guided by his desire, usually finding willing partners without too much difficulty, so he could indulge. And he says the repentance that older people show, where they deplore their bad youth (and it could have been sex; it could have been drinking; it could have been gambling; it could have been whatever you want), he doesn’t really care for that, because he says: “You know what? In old age, all that’s really happened is the appetites have gotten weaker. It’s not like my faculty of reason, which is what it really would have taken to become a better person, has become stronger.” As a matter of fact, it might actually be weaker now because it has less opposition from the unruly appetites that have to be governed and reasoned with, you could say, by reason. And so he says: “If I had the same appetites that I did when I was, we’ll say a kid (meaning a teenager, a twenty-something, maybe even a thirty-something), I’d probably still be doing the same stuff. I haven’t become temperate or chaste, because in order to be those things, I would have had to have changed my disposition. I just don’t have the appetite for going out and getting it on.” So what I see in this, and what I find attractive in it, is an acknowledgment of who he is. Montaigne is not putting on any airs to be a better person than he is. I think that he was a decent person. Actually, I’m willing to call him good in many respects. But he didn’t need to try to make himself out to be better than he was. He wasn’t interested in self-deception or in trying to project something outwardly that he didn’t have. And what I like the most is he is willing to recognize the fact that there are other people who are indeed better than him, and that he could have been a better person, but just isn’t. Now you might say, “Well, that’s not a good thing to recognize.” I think it is a good thing to recognize, and I like his attitude about it, which is that I’m not going to have great repentance about this. I can recognize the good and call it what it is without having to try to falsely make it my own. Would it have been better for him to have, I don’t know, had some great moment or period of repentance and totally amended his life? Yeah, perhaps. And that’s a “perhaps,” right? There’s no guarantees in these sorts of things. But in point of fact, that isn’t what happened with him, even though he had tools, even though he had models, even though he had the leisure to think about matters at great length, as we know from his essays, but that isn’t what happened. And so as he’s looking back at his life, he can be realistic and content. I’m not saying that everybody should be like that. I like the fact that Montaigne is like that. I’m not even sure that I myself want to emulate that, but there is something to me admirable about it. And there’s a little paradox to close on. So, there’s something admirable about a man who confesses that he’s really not that good, could have been better, but is not going to repent over it. How can that be the case? Well, it is the case. So, the question that we have to ask is not the “how” of logical possibility, it’s not the defensive “How could this be the case?” that some people would throw out there, where it’s really a substitution for saying “This isn’t the case”. It’s rather an opportunity to think a bit more, to go a bit further than Montaigne himself did in his essay. And I think that would be something that he would be quite happy to find his readers doing. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe (https://gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

3. 

   23 Jul 2026

   Episode 57 - Writers For Whom Religion Just Made Matters More Complicated

   I had an interesting exchange a little while back about an author whose works I really like, and who I went through a “reading jag” phase, you could say, where I was reading my way through as many of his works as I can get my hands on, and that was Graham Greene. Now, it was back in graduate school when I first got into his work, and it was not through one of his, you know, considered to be “best” novels. I’d heard his name, I picked up, I think it’s called A Gun for Sale, and it was really good! And I was like, “Oh, I’ve got to read more of this guy.” So in any case, I had this exchange with somebody who was talking about how they were reading Graham Greene, and we got to talking about different circles that we moved in. And this guy was saying that typically, the people who like Graham Greene are going to be lapsed Catholics. And I thought, “Well, that’s a weird thing to say.” Although, you know, certainly that’s what I was when I was reading him; I’d left the church a long time before, actually back when I was in Catholic high school, and hadn’t come back at that time. But I really enjoyed Greene. And Greene was one of those Catholic writers himself who winds up being a convert, and never is entirely at ease. He’s always got some controversies going on, the characters who are conflicted about that sort of thing. And so, we got into this conversation online, and I said, “You know, that’s not really my experience. I know a lot of practicing Catholics who like Graham Greene, I know a lot of atheists who like Graham Greene. I suppose that if you are a person of faith who’s struggling with faith, maybe Greene would be an interesting person for you to read, both in terms of his characters and in terms of his own viewpoints. But, you know, he’s not all that unique in that respect.” And then I said (here’s where we’re actually going to get to the main point of this) something that I’ve said many times before in AMA sessions, and when I’m asked about these sorts of things: I like reading religious authors for whom being religious doesn’t simplify things. It actually makes things more complicated. And in some respects conflicted, but also rich. It reflects a world, a universe, a cosmos in which there’s greater depth and complexity than a nice, simple, straightforward one. I think that there’s a lot of people who are religious in different ways for whom, we’ll just take Christianity, you know, meeting Jesus suddenly cleared up all of their doubts and gave them the rule of life that they’re going to follow and boxes that everything can fit into. They understand exactly who the sheep and the goats are, or the wheat and the chaff. And when people say stuff like that, I’m usually a little bit suspicious of their epistemological stance, not least because in those Gospels, it’s not up to them to decide! We see so many cases where the person who we think is definitely going to be the good guy turns out not to be so, and vice versa, or mercy is shown to somebody who you wouldn’t expect is going to receive it. There are all sorts of paradoxical statements. And we’re cautioned in quite a few places about making absolute judgments as if we have a God’s-eye view. Nonetheless, a lot of people, and not just in Christianity, but all sorts of religions, will say, “Oh, everything is now clear to me.” Usually what that results in is a kind of impoverished world. And I’m actually going to draw upon another convert Catholic thinker whose conversion also made his life quite a bit more complicated: G.K. Chesterton. In his book Orthodoxy, which is a really great short little work, he talks about the insane person, the madman. And he says that the real problem with the madman is that his world actually is logically consistent, but it’s able to be so because it is impoverished. It is a world that, in certain respects, is too small. So that’s a very interesting observation. He doesn’t say they’re wrong. He says that you can’t really deal with the madman without going into their crazy world. And I think this is the case for oversimplified worlds, not just in religion, but I think also in politics, I think in philosophy, I think in a lot of different areas of life. Which isn’t to say that some things aren’t black and white at times, or cut-and-dry as we say, but less things tend to be than we give them credit for. So the notion in philosophy that you’re either a Platonist or an Aristotelian, or a rationalist or an empiricist, or an idealist or a materialist, if that’s really how you divide up the cosmos, your world is really too small, too shrunken-in on itself. It doesn’t have enough complexity and categories to it. Now, coming back to religious thinkers, I said the people who I enjoy the most (and I think it’s worth coming back to that sense of enjoyment and what that actually looks like) are the ones for whom religion has actually made things more complex. Having God in the picture didn’t answer every single question, solve every doubt. Now there’s more on their shoulder, more weight, because they need to get things right, and maybe they feel a little bit out of their depth, but they also know where they can turn. I will actually say, Anselm of Canterbury, who a lot of people frame as if he’s this arch-rationalist, mainly because they haven’t actually read his works, or they weren’t paying close enough attention, or they read in somebody else’s history of philosophy or Christian thought or theology that he’s a rationalist, they construe him that way. But he’s actually quite concerned about getting things right, and calling upon divine grace to help him use reason to figure out these matters that he says, “These are tricky! These are complicated! I’m not just going to give you some nice argument about why God became man and now problem solved, or whether God exists in the nature of God, or how you get out of the mire and abysses of sins that you’ve placed yourselves in.” No, he is really working things out in dramatic ways, even in his philosophical or theological treatises. And then when we get to people like novelists, man, it gets even more tricky, more complicated! So I’ve already mentioned Graham Greene and G.K. Chesterton. Somebody else I would bring up is Flannery O’Connor. She writes amazing short stories, but she also writes some really interesting letters to people who wanted to consult her about various matters in life and religion, and she shows a real depth and understanding of the trickiness of things. And that’s what makes her work so valuable. I’ll also say in philosophy, thinkers like Blaise Pascal or Søren Kierkegaard, I would also say Michel de Montaigne and Miguel de Unamuno, and other people like that who kind of waver back and forth and might not actually be committed religiously, but can take religion seriously enough to grapple with it, fit into that spectrum. In our own last century, I think Gabriel Marcel is a great representative of this (what do we want to call it?) tendency or secret fellowship of those who try to work out complicated matters in complicated ways. Now, I said that I would talk a little bit about the enjoyment that comes with it. And it’s not the enjoyment of solving a puzzle, which I think is what a lot of people are looking for. You just complete the crossword or the word search and now you can hold it up and say, “Aha! I won!” That’s not the way it works in reading theology or philosophy or literature, or even history. Things are trickier, more complex than that. And I think there’s a different kind of enjoyment that comes with appreciating that, and trying to go part of the way along with people who are intelligent, but don’t think that they are of God-like intelligence, who are trying their best to make sense out of these different matters that they think really do matter. So to come back to Graham Greene, I’m actually going to recommend one of his stories that manages to do this within a space of not too many pages, so you don’t have to read an entire novel. And it does so from the perspective of a narrator, ultimately, who is not religiously committed. Sort of like Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments are in the pseudonym of somebody who’s not religiously committed, but can kind of get what’s going on there. It’s called “The Hint of an Explanation.” And I think it’s a really wonderful little story. You might say, “Well, just tell me the moral of it right away. Is it, well God exists? Or the Eucharist is where you meet Jesus?” It’s not that straightforward and simple. There’s like the title says a hint of an explanation, but not a full explanation. And it’s requiring you, the reader, to enter that world. You don’t actually have to be religiously committed to appreciate and to consider what’s happening within that narrative space, just like you don’t need to be a Platonist to enter into Plato’s dialogues and follow along with some of the ideas. I think there’s a similar dynamic at work there that might give you pleasure, joy, but also perplexity, however you want to think about it. But it’s valuable to engage in that sort of reading. So, I’ll draw this to a close here, these reflections. I might take this up at greater length down the line, but I think that’s probably enough to throw your way right now as something you might consider. Gregory B. Sadler - That Philosophy Guy is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Gregory Sadler is the founder of ReasonIO (https://reasonio.wordpress.com/), the co-founder of The Stoic Heart® (https://stoicheart.substack.com/), a speaker, writer, and producer of popular (https://www.youtube.com/user/gbisadler)YouTube videos (https://www.youtube.com/user/gbisadler) on philosophy. He is co-host of the radio show (https://medium.com/gregory-b-sadler-ph-d/wisdom-for-life-radio-show-episodes-fe78c29cf7d9) Wisdom for Life (https://medium.com/gregory-b-sadler-ph-d/wisdom-for-life-radio-show-episodes-fe78c29cf7d9), and producer of the Sadler’s Lectures (https://medium.com/gregory-b-sadler-ph-d/the-sadlers-lectures-podcast-56e18619c5aa) podcast (https://medium.com/gregory-b-sadler-ph-d/the-sadlers-lectures-podcast-56e18619c5aa). You can request short personalized videos at his (https://www.cameo.com/gregorybsadler)Cameo (https://www.cameo.com/gregorybsadler)page (https://www.cameo.com/gregorybsadler). If you’d like to take online classes with him, check out the (https://reasonio.teachable.com/)Study With Sadler Academy (https://reasonio.teachable.com/). This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe (https://gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

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