HCJ2 - Zeitgeist

In Our Time (R4) this morning was about James Joyce - Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man. This afternoon the lecture is about George Orwell, Wittgenstein and the Philosophy of Language. All lectures are of equal but some lectures are of more equal than others - and this is one of them! Generally speaking his is very much a high point of the whole HCJ series, in many ways all the material about the enlightenment, romanticism, nationalism, Hegel, Marx, Freud and modernism builds towards Orwell given his standing as probably the greatest journalist of the 20th century, and certainly the journalist who made the biggest contribution to contemporary philosophy and to popular culture ('Big Brother' and 'Room 101' and 'Though Crime' etc). Be sure to read Orwell's short essay Politics and the English Langauge (this contain the core of his argument, and it is easy to find at many locations around the web). See also: 1984 And a more recent TV document derived from Orwell (same team that made the 'century of Freud' series for the BBC - Adam Curtis's The Power of Nightmares ("there's always a war"). Orwell and pop culture - Hollywood - Its OK! - he gets the girl in the end! But 1984 is full of philosophical ideas (eg 2+2 does equal 4, no matter what the state says = Descartes) ("They can't get inside your mind" = Kant) and the all pervading paranoia, sexual repression, masochistic puritanism and orgisatic hatred = Freud and his political followers.