Free Thinking: Ecstasy. Carpe Diem. 2017 New Generation Thinker Hetta Howes on medieval ecstasy.

Arts & Ideas

BBC

Society & Culture

4.2 • 599 Ratings

🗓️ 1 June 2017

⏱️ 57 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Why we need to seize the moment and lose control more often is discussed by philosophers Jules Evans and Roman Krznaric and Canon Angela Tilby. And presenter Rana Mitter is joined by 2017 New Generation Thinker Hetta Howes, whose research looks at medieval attitudes to ecstasy.

'Carpe Diem Regained: The Vanishing Art of Seizing the Day' by Roman Krznaric is out now www.carpediem.click Jules Evans is a 2013 New Generation Thinker who blogs at http://www.philosophyforlife.org/ His book The Art of Losing Control is out now. Canon Angela Tilby is a contributor to Radio 4's Thought for the Day. Her website is http://www.angelatilby.co.uk/Index/Welcome.html Dr Hetta Howes is at Queen Mary The University of London.

You can hear Haemin Sunim at the Free Thinking Festival here http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08jb1mp

New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and BBC Arts with the Arts and Humanities Research Council to find academics who can turn their research into radio and television. You can find out more via the Free Thinking website.

Producer: Luke Mulhall

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right?
0:23.3	It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music
0:27.0	when it's out of ice cream.
0:28.8	Listen to Evil Genius on BBC Sounds.
0:32.1	This is the BBC.
0:37.4	Thank you for downloading this Arts and Ideas podcast from the free thinking team at the BBC.
0:43.3	And here's a message from composer Alexander Scriabin.
1:01.2	Wondering what that meant well here's what scryabin had to say in the programme notes for the premier of his poem of ecstasy in 1908 he said when the spirit has attained the supreme culmination
1:08.8	of its activity and has been torn away from the embraces of teleology and relativity.
1:13.6	When it has exhausted completely its substance and its liberated active energy, the time of ecstasy shall arrive.
1:22.6	Well, the time of ecstasy has certainly arrived here on free thinking.
1:26.6	Many of our lives today in the Western world have all too little ecstasy in them.
1:31.6	We're too busy working, waiting, texting and worrying.
1:35.4	That must be why a range of new books has been trying to stop us from drowning in the maelstrom of modernity.
1:41.3	Elsewhere in the Free Thinking Archive, you'll find a conversation with Buddhist
1:44.7	thinker Heyman Sunim on things you only notice if you slow down. But today, we're not slowing
1:50.8	down. We're losing control and loving it. We're gyrating, cogitating and meditating, to work out
1:57.8	what ecstasy is, and to learn the art of seizing the moment. We're with me, a four devotees of ecstasy is and to learn the art of seizing the moment.
2:02.4	Well, with me, a four devotees of ecstasy.
2:05.5	Jules Evans at the Centre for the History of the Emotions at Queen Mary London,
2:09.3	author of a new book, The Art of Losing Control, and a Radio 3 New Generation Thinker.
2:15.1	Heta House is also at Queen Mary, and she's one of this year's new
	...

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